Introduction

Web analytics services are responsible for getting information about the customer. These data are necessary to optimize processes and marketing. This information has many aspects:

• Technical aspects
  • How many users use a specific browser version?
  • How many users use small or mobile devices?
  • Is my shop visible in Alaska?

• Business aspects
  • How does the user find my site?
  • On which web page do most users leave the shop?
  • How much revenue is generated by users?
  • What is the main click stream on my site?

Web analytics services are responsible to collect the business data and transfer these data to the analytics service.

References

• Wikipedia: about Web analytics in general
• Concept - Managed Service Framework: describes how to start a service implementation
• Concept - Business Tracking: about receiving business events
• Concept - Page Cache: about storefront rendering

How It Works

Most pages of the storefront are cached. So the main pipelines of a page will not be executed again if the page has been cached. This can lead to missing tracking events when the server side tracks the events. It is important that the implementation uses uncached remote includes to trigger the events. The client-side tracking implements the analytics services call via a Java script or tracking pixels. Mostly, the client-side tracking depends on the service provider's needs.

How It Is Implemented

A web analytics integration combines two major implementation tasks:

1. Collecting data (on events)
2. Transferring data to the analytics service

The first task can be achieved by using the Business Tracking Framework. The storefront application provides a growing set of business events.
The second task depends on the service to integrate. A comparable demo client-side integration is available at Cookbook - WebAnalytics.