Enabling web analytics

Development model: MVC Portal Engine
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Web analytics are disabled by default. To enable logging of analytics for your website:

  1. Open the Settings application.
  2. Select the On-line marketing -> Web Analytics category.
  3. Check Enable web analytics.
  4. Save the settings.

The other settings in the Web analytics category enable or disable tracking of individual types of statistics and events. See Settings - Web analytics for details.

Disk permissions

Web analytics require your ASP.NET account to have the Modify permission for the ~/App_Data folder on your disk. See Disk permission problems to learn how to find the account name.

Selecting the logging method

The system provides two different ways of logging web analytics:

Processing analytics on every web request

Using JavaScript

Advantages:

  • Provides statistics for all types of web requests.

Advantages:

  • Filters out statistics generated by non-human tools such as RSS readers and web crawlers.
  • Provides more accurate and relevant data for most public-facing websites.

Disadvantages:

  • Results may be skewed by non-human traffic such as web crawlers, RSS readers and other bots (typically irrelevant statistics).

Disadvantages:

  • Ignores users with browsers that do not support JavaScript or have it disabled (typically less than 1% of all visitors).
  • If your website uses custom analytics, JavaScript logging does not affect their functionality. This may lead to inconsistency with the default analytics.
  • May not work correctly on pages that run custom JavaScripts (if conflicts occur). The logging is compatible with all default Kentico scripts.

In most cases, it is recommended to use JavaScript logging for web analytics. Switching to JavaScript logging does not reduce the performance of the website.

To enable JavaScript logging:

  1. Open the Settings application.
  2. Select the On-line marketing -> Web Analytics category.
  3. Enable the Log via JavaScript snippet setting.
  4. Save the settings.

Note: This setting also determines how the system logs on-line marketing activities related to website traffic.