Liferay Monitoring Using Google Analytics

Liferay includes built-in support for Google Analytics, allowing administrators to make use of Google's tool set for analyzing site traffic data. When you sign up for Google Analytics, a snippet of code is provided which needs to be added to your web pages in order to allow Google's system to register the page hit. It can be a tedious process to add this code to every page on a site, especially if it is a large site and there is a lot of user-generated content.

This problem can be solved in Liferay by putting Google's code into a custom theme written especially for the site on which the portal is running. Doing this, however, requires that a theme developer make specific changes to the theme, and it prevents users from using the many freely available themes that are available for Liferay "out of the box."

Because of this, support for Google Analytics has been built into Liferay, and can be turned on through a simple user interface. This allows Liferay Administrators to make use of Google Analytics on a community by community basis and turn it on and off when needed.

To enable Google Analytics support, go to the Manage Pages screen for the community for which you want to enable support. You can do this through the Control Panel by going to either the Organizations or Communities link in the Portal section, and then clicking Actions → Manage Pages for the community or organization you want to analyze. Click the Settings tab.

Illustration 88: Setting Up Google AnalyticsClick the Monitoring Tab. Put your Google Analytics ID (which should have been provided to you when you signed up for the service) in the field and click Save. All of the pages in the community you selected will now have the Google Analytics code in them and will be tracked.