How to Use eZ Publish Extensions: Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a portal for viewing reports on website activity. The portal uses dynamic HTML, JavaScript and Flash to provide access to a set of reports that describe various types of activity on your site.

With Google Analytics, the eZ Tennis Club site can track basic information such as page views, but also perform much more sophisticated operations, like gathering webshop statistics, setting goals, measuring the success of Google AdWords campaigns, seeing how much time people are spending on the site, exporting reports and more. Statistics can be filtered by many different properties, such as by specific keyword or URL, in order to produce refined results. This is documented in the Google Analytics Help Center.

In this tutorial, we will give a brief tour of some of the basic Google Analytics functionality and show you how to set up automatic report generation.

After logging into your Google Analytics account, click the View Reports link for your site.

The left menu of the reporting interface provides access to information about who your visitors are (the Visitors item), how they got to your site (the Traffic Sources item), and which pages they are accessing (the Content item). We will describe one of the pages under each of these sections. We strongly encourage you to explore the Google Analytics documentation and interface, as this article only presents a small portion of what can be done.

Under the Visitors menu item, the Map Overlay page is a visual representation of where site visitors are located. Since the eZ Tennis Club wishes to attract an international audience, it can track the progress of its efforts in reaching the different parts of the globe.

Under the Traffic Sources menu item, on the Search Engines page, you can see which search terms visitors are using in order to find your site. The eZ Tennis Club is able to use this information to reveal what people are looking for when they come to the site. They can then make decisions regarding what keywords they need to target more, or perhaps what unexpected topics could be expanded upon in order for the club to reach a broader audience.

Under the Content menu item, the Top Content page shows which URLs are the most popular on a site. If the eZ Tennis Club were to run a marketing campaign to promote an upcoming tournament, it could direct all interested visitors to a specific tournament page, such as http://tennisdemo.ezsystems.ca/eztourney. Using Google Analytics, it could then gauge the success of that marketing campaign based on how many people visited that page and how much time they spent on that page.

Email reports

You can configure one-time or scheduled customized email reports with a variety of report export formats. Simply click the Email button on almost any report view. This will send an email with an attached report.

If you click the Schedule tab, you can send periodic reports to interested parties in order to track regular progress on your website.

Exportable reports

You can export reports into a variety of output formats including PDF, CSV, XML and TSV. Simply click the Export button on almost any report view and select the desired report format by clicking the export format link. This will open a new window prompting you to save the exported report file.