Using Analytics with sh404SEF

You can't improve what you can't measure

One key element in any SEO strategy is to measure results of actions taken. This is why sh404SEF wants to make it easy to enable analytics measurement of your web site traffic. As the golden standard of analytics, we've integrated Google Analytics into sh404SEF. We offer integration in two areas:

Tracking code

Enabling Google Analytics means that a small bit of javascript must be inserted inside your pages that needs to be tracked and measured. sh404SEF will do that for you, with several convenient options to decide when and how to insert or not that snippet.

Results display

All analytics reporting features in sh404SEF will stop working on or after October 3, 2022. This is due to changes in Google authorization procedures that cannot be integrated into sh404SEF. We'll remove all analytics features soon after that date.

Note that analytics snippets injection will keep working as usual and all traffic data will be recorded by Google normally. You will however have to visit Google Analytics own dashboard to view traffic data.

Tracking is nice, but getting results is better. For non-specialists, viewing traffic results directly on the Google Analytics web site might be confusing. There's a wealth of data available, but also many options. Getting used to viewing just what you want may take time.

Instead, sh404SEF will display key metrics about your site visitors, so that you get the desired data right away. This data can be displayed:

• in sh404SEF control panel
• on the front end of your site

When displaying Analytics on the front end, access can be granted after logging-in but as well through a unique access code: this lets you allow access to users without requiring yet another username and password.

Getting a Google Analytics account and web property ID

To get started, you need to have a Google Analytics account, and locate there the web property ID associated with your website. We won't go into the details of doing this, as there are many tutorials on the web about it.

A good place to start though is the official Google Analytics getting started page from Google themselves.

You only need to follow those tutorials to open your Google Analytics account and get a property ID. Once you have it, come back to your Joomla! site and sh404SEF will do the rest.

Specifically, you don't need to insert the tracking code yourself in a page, or in your template or in Joomla! index.php file.