Tracking JomSocial with Google Analytics
Posted by: irwan on Apr 18, 2011
JomSocial is an excellent system to create a successful online community. I'm pretty sure most of you will agree with me on that. This blogpost is not about the excellence of the JomSocial system, it's about tracking the use of your online community in Google Analytics.
Why should you track your JomSocial website?
Sure, your JomSocial community is very easy on the eyes and you may have lots of active users, but how effective is your site? How many registered users did you add to your community last month? And how did they find your website? Getting answers to these questions give you an excellent startingpoint to improve you website and get a better understanding of your users.
Easy-to-use Google Analytics tips to get you started
- Installing the Google Analytics tracking code on your website.
Installing the Google Analytics code on your website is the first step to tracking your visitors in Google Analytics. To do so, you need to setup a Google Analytics account. Register for an account here.
Once this is done, you can install a simple plugin to implement the tracking code into your website source code. Try this straightforward Google Analytics plugin by Analytics for Joomla to get started. - Tracking registrations in Google Analytics.
It might be interesting to see how your userbase is growing. Just imagine the seasonal trends on your website or valuable traffic sources to your website to give you more insight into the potential sources to attract new users. You can track this with goal tracking in Google Analytics.
The goal url needs to be added to the setup to make sure you can best track the goal in Google Analytics. This is the standard url for your JomSocial registration page.
index.php/using-joomla/extensions/components/users-component/registration-form?layout=complete
If you customized your installation, just fill out the registration form and check the url of the thank you page. That's, the url you need for Goal tracking in Google Analytics. - Track internal search engine with Google Analytics.
Your internal search engine can give you valuable information about the interests of your users. Learn more about the value of internal search engines and what you can do with that information here.
To setup the internal search function in Google Analytics, follow these instructions by Google Analytics and use the JomSocial parameter 'q' to start tracking. - Tracking the interaction with the tabs
This functionality might tell you a lot about the way users interact with the different tabs on you user profiles. What if no users are interested in the video tab of the profile. Will you keep it? Or will you push it forward to make sure people can find it easier? Google Analytics can give you insights in how people use your website.
You can set it up as a goal, just like tracking registrations. Here's how this works:- Set the type of goal to 'regular expression'
- Add the following url for the video tab 'index.php/jomsocial/.*/videos'
- Or this url for the photos tab 'index.php/jomsocial/.*/photos'
More on Google Analytics for JomSocial to come!
I'm sure you have lots of requests for additional tracking and insights of your JomSocial website. That's why Jomsocial has joined forces with Analytics for Joomla to develop an advanced Google Analytics plugin to enable sophisticated tracking of the effectiveness of your Jomsocial community. Stay tuned for more on this subject soon.
About the author
This is a guestpost by Martijn van Vreeden, a webanalist and founder of Analytics for Joomla. He writes blogs and develops Joomla plugins related to web analytics, conversion optimization at Analytics for Joomla. If you want to get in touch with Martijn to discuss web analytics for Joomla websites , follow him on twitter.
11 Response(s)
By mentions, I have not left any previous projects. JS G-KUNENA, JS SEO TAGS, JS FIA and JS PROCOM (as well as JS XMAP) are working as usual. We use them ourselves in our sites, and many users keep using them. About JS FACE, Facebook changed the way third applications integrate in their framework and now we have to redesign the whole thing (becuase by removing applications tabs from user profiles they disabled the entry point of our navigation system). We have to re-think about the best way to perform these tasks. We have disabled JS FACE subscriptions until we work it out. But all other extensions are working as usual. We haven't updated them for Joomla 1.6 yet because we haven't had enough time to take care of it, because we need to atend many projects (one of these projects is Social Analytics and our analytics tools).
Sure, we should upgrade everything and keep everything up-to-date, and we work hard, but we don't have enough resources to do everything at the same time. We have to priorize projects the way we thing is better for everyone (some people may disagree with the way we do it, and I've talked about it with Jarek before, but I'm sure everybody has yo make these choices in their projects and their lives).
And there is something else I'd like to tell. We don't build our extensions to earn money, we build our extensions because we need them ourselves. If somebody has developed what we need, we buy it and start using it. But when we don't find what we're looking for, we build it: first for ourselves, because we need it; and then for anyboduy else that can make good use of it.
Social Analytics is a fantastic tool, and prodvides detailed insights of your online communities that otherwise would be hard to notice. It has been very useful for us, and if it's useful for you, we have prepared it so you can get it and use it on your sites.
PD: I'm not sure whether this is the best place to talk about it, but I had to do it by mentions.
Unfortunately you are trying to sell your new product and as very disappointed client I feel obligated to inform jomsocial community that if they purchase any of your product they will have Very High chances to be left alone with support and updates when you will find another project to focus on.
When you sell product you are also committing provide upgrades and support within reasonable time frame.
At this moment what version of jomsocial is supported by your js g-kunena and other products?
What is the response time frame from support 2, 3 , 4 weeks or none?
Unfortunately you have a lot of unsolved issues with current clients and everyone should be aware of it and does not matter how good your new product is you are not running legitimate business model.
Sorry
But in case you're interested, we have developed another reporting tool that tells you further information about your JomSocial network: Social Analytics (http://analytictools.latitudweb.com/products/social-analytics.html).
It is a Joomla Extension, and it is not designed to work instead of Google Analytics but hand-in-hand with it, to complement it.
For example, Google Analytics cannot tell you how many photos your community holds, or what your most active users are; while Social Analytics can tell you not only that, but also in which specific group (or category) photos are placed, what users uploaded them, how they were uploaded over time (by users, by categories, by groups, and also by days, weeks, or months), and many more.
This is because Social Analitics has full access to both JomSocial and Joomla datamodels.
Besides it's very easy to use, because user inteaction resembles that of Google Analytics (you always have to learn form the best) and our users are very happy with that.
I wasn't aware of the existence of Social Analytics. It sounds very interesting and certainly looks very cool!
It looks to me like the functionalities can complement those of Google Analytics very well. However, when you are gathering data and analyzing your website's performance, it is beneficial to do this in one centralized point. Connecting data about tracking traffic sources to onsite user behavior and multiple conversion point makes the data even more valuable and actionable. Hopefully Social Analytics will be able to provide that some day.
If you'd like to discuss this further, feel free to email me info(at)analyticsforjoomla.com
I've seen you develop some useful analytics plugins for Joomla. Congratulations, they also look very nice.
About your comment, you're right, Social Analytics is designed to complement Google Analytics (GA) where it doesn't reach: YOUR DATABASE, that that runs your site. GA tracks the data from URLs and user sessions, and that gives you a very good view on how your website is performing. But GA can not tell you what's actually there, what exactly your users are doing, whether they are uploading some photos (7 new photos that take 3.2 MB disk space), joining an specific group (and now the group holds 128 members) or making a new friend (and now he's got 20). All that information is only available on your database, and surely you'd prefer it this way.
I also think that one centralized point is useful, but in this case I believe GA and Social Analytics serve a different purpose. GA is the point of observation (outside your website), while Social Analytics is the point of action (inside your website). If both of them were to be joint, either GA will have to take Social Analytics features or the other way around. GA will not get full access to your database unless it's fully redesigned to work that way and you grant access to it (anyway, would you like it this way?), and sure we're not going to recode all GA features inside Social Analytics. No kidding, we are not a top 50 Fortune enterprises to develop all that, and it won't make much sense to do so, once all the features are already there in GA.
We really appreciate your feedback, of course. But at this point, we'll keep the action path we believe is better: GA performing user session tracking using URL's and cookies, and Social Analytics displaying accurate information on what's on your website and what's actually happening there, when, how and who. And that information, that is on YOUR DATABASE, is only used, managed and processed by you (and your site administrators).
Through our plugins Analytics for Joomla is able to pull data out of the Joomla database, as long as there is a permission given by the administrator in the backend of the plugin. The Joomla API allows us to do this and is very robust. Wether you want to add this data to your webanalytics tool is entirely up to the user and if the plugin allows you to do this.
GA is much more than just an observation point. The data is extremely actionable and rich. I have built dozens of businesscases based on GA data and optimized websites based on the insights the data provided to me. All major web analytics tools can provide you with actionable insights, it´s just up to the users of the tool to know what the actions are.
GA is extremely powerful. With event tracking we can get a lot of data about specific actions on a Joomla website (not just your Jomsocial section), like social shares, uploads of video´s, etc.
Secondly, no matter how you setup GA, it'll never get full access to your site database (I know what it can do, ... and what it can't). Social Analytics, using the Joomla and JomSocial APIs and datamodels, is already there without any limitation (and you own it).
Sure you can use many tricks to try to simulate this, and to send additional information from your website to GA, but you'll never get the complexity and accuracy of Social Analytics for two reasons: GA is not designed to track JomSocial online communities (it's a general tracking tool) and it doesn't take into account all the information that's on your database and can be useful to you as a manager.
While Social Analytics is designed for JomSocial/Joomla, and if you want to get a new report, we can build it for you in a few hours.
Furthermore, all the tricks you can use to send additional information from your site database to GA, can simply be broken by the user blocking Javascript or blocking the call to GA. If they do that, it's over: GA is completely blind about what these users are doing on your website. The same thing would happen when the GA Javascript call fails, is delayed, or is not fully fulfilled; and it happens many times.
We have another reporting tools, Sales Analytics, that we use to track VirtueMart sales. We also has setup GA E-Commerce features using a Joomla plugin. You know what? GA E-Commerce gives you a good insight, but GA report sales are around 7-20% below actual sales incomes, because not all of them are rightly handled in GA. Of course you can use it to take a look, but if you want to get accurate sales reports with accurate income amounts, you need to use an specifically designed report tool on your site database (for example Sales Analytics). The same thing happens with Social Analytics and your JomSocial online community.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that GA is not useful or accurate. Indeed it's extremely useful and there is no single website we build that does not include the GA tracking code. But, because of its nature as a global solution and the nature of its tracking code, it also has many limitations you have to overcome if you want to get accurate reports on what's exactly on your website, who, when and how.
The way we see it, these tools complement each other. If you use both you'll get a complete view of what's on your website. And Social Analytics is on your Joomla backend (where you manage your site, and you own it) while Google Aanlytics is outside of it, de-centralices the management, and it's not yours.
If you would like to discuss this topic further, feel free to email me: info(at)analyticsforjoomla.com.
