Yes, Google Analytics. I decided it was time to step back and figure out how the leader of the pack does things so that I can truly understand Sitecore’s offering in this space. As I’ve been diving more and more into the analytics discussion, my main focus has been on understanding Sitecore’s quickly growing and rich analytics offering and to describe the benefits to partners and prospects. Invariably, though, the challenging discussion comes up: “do I use this instead of Google Analytics?”, and: “I have this set of reports from GA….are you saying Sitecore’s reports are different, better?”.
So, now I’m setting off on a journey to understand this a lot better. The good thing—we have a public Launch Sitecore site that has been up and running now for some time with both Google Analytics and Sitecore Analytics gathering some great data. Not a huge site, but very effective in considering things like Goals/Conversions, Segmentation, Referral Sources / Campaigns, and more.
My goal with this exercise is to truly define the best of both worlds. Google Analytics is huge, rich, entrenched, effective. Sitecore Analytics is laser focused on the the best Customer Engagement Platform on the planet. Let’s try to answer the questions….where do these tools differ, overlap, complement? How are they used together and what does each uniquely bring to the table?
For this simple start, one question that often comes up: how do I integrate Sitecore with Google Analytics. While this discussion could take off on a few different directions, let’s keep this ridiculously simple for now and see where we need to expand the answer. For now, because of the great Sitecore presentation strategy, it’s as easy as this:
- Sign up for a Google Analytics account if you don’t already have one
- Copy the javascript GA gives you to insert into your pages for tracking
- In Launch Sitecore, since we have one Layout that governs our entire browser-based design, all we have to do is insert that javascript right before </body>. This will automatically track every Sitecore item / page that uses this layout (in the case of Launch Sitecore, this means all pages).
- Sit back and let Google start collecting
- (oh yeah), Sitecore DMS is already working its collection magic without the javascript.
Next we’ll start to drill into the data a bit and start to understand if our Launch Sitecore site is meeting up to our goals.
