Google Analytics in today's website is as important as the web-server itself. There are countless of reasons for having analytics, but the top three reasons are:
- find out how much traffic are you actually getting
- which page does your traffic land on
- what keywords typed into the search engine to get the traffic to your website
Adding Google Analytics can be really simple depending on how much knowledge of HTML you know. At this point, I will assume that you have a Google account, you've signed up for Google Analytics at Google.com/analytics/ with your Google account.
If you haven't created a website profile, please do so by selecting the "Add Website Profile»" link found at the bottom left of the body of the page. After filling out your information you will be provided with a code which looks like a lot of gobbledygook. Save that code, we will need it later. You created your profile but cannot find your code, then in the Website Profiles select the "Edit" button that appears on right for the website you would like to track.
The Profile Settings page will show that information you provided upon signing up for tracking of your and at the top right of the gay box that provides your information is a link in parenthesis called "Status Check". Click on that link and you will be provided with the doe that you will need to add to your Joomla! template.
Deamweaver or 3rd Party Editor
If you use a 3rd party tool like Dreamweaver to edit or upload your template, in the main website folder find the "templates" folder then you'll see folders for each theme/design you have to upload. Select the folder of the theme/template you are using and find the index.php page. All Joomla! web pages get rendered based on index.php.
Open up index.php and paste the tracking code immediately before the closing </head> tag. Then save the file and upload you index.php to the web server and return to Google Analytics to check the Tracking Status which can be found the main page and visualized as a green checkmark.
Using Joomla Editor to Add Code
Not using a 3rd party editor, you can add the code easily by logging into your administration panel in Joomla! (usually http:// www.yourdomain.com/administrator). When you're logged in, at the top menu that has the drop downs under
On the Template Manager page you will see that there is a gold star in the Default column for the template that is currently being utilized. Select the radio button on the left to the name of the template, and at the top right select the "edit" button.
Then select the "Edit HTML" button, and you will see HTML code. Look for the </head> tag at the top of the document, and paste the tracking code immediately before the closing </head> tag.
You can then return to analytics and look for the green checkmark in the status column to make sure that data is being collected.
