Most companies use Google Analytics or similar web tracking tool to better understand their visitors and how they use the website. These metrics can help you improve your site’s design. Do you ever wonder how your Salesforce users actually use your Salesforce website? Which pages do they visit? Which links do they click? Do they really use that nifty visualforce page you just deployed? How are they navigating Salesforce so that you can improve their user experience? Just as you gather these metrics on your company site, you can do the same by integrating Google Analytics to your Salesforce instance! This solution relies heavily on the “embed javascript via custom home page sidebar component” design by Uwe Heim. It is very easy to put together, setup time approx. 10-15 minutes.

UPDATE (June 2016):

In the comments, Sandeep Kondapalli recommends implementing this solution with Visualforce Home Page component as you can use <apex:includeScript> or native <script> to include the javascript and execute immediately. I have not tried this yet, but hopefully this is the simple change needed to get the solution to work post Winter ’16 release.

UPDATE (October 2015):

As of the Winter ’16 release, custom JavaScript buttons and links no longer have their REQUIRESCRIPT tags executed on page load. Only when the user clicks the button or link will the script be included. This behavior change may render this Google Analytics solution obsolete.

Create Google Analytics Account (FREE)

1.  Create your free account at http://www.google.com/analytics/

You will either need to sign-in with existing Google profile or create a new one. I created a new Google profile just for this purpose to not muck with my personal email account.

This was my first foray into Google Analytics and took me a minute to understand how to set it up. Right or wrong, I named my “Account” as my company then created two (2) “Properties”, one for my production salesforce org and one for my sandbox org. This way I could keep clicks in the sandbox environment separate from the real site.

2.  Create a new Property to generate a tracking id. You will need to specify a Name and URL for the property. Make sure when specifying the URL you use https:// protocol. The URL should be the base domain you use to log into Salesforce (e.g. https://<yourdomain>.my.salesforce.com or https://<yourserver>.salesforce.com)

As noted above, I actually created two properties, one named “Salesforce Production” and the other “Salesforce Sandbox”.

3.  As personal preference, if you scroll down on that same Property Settings page then under the In-Page Analytics section you can enable the Use enhanced link attribution. Because of this, you’ll notice some extra javascript I had to include when we move on to the next step of creating the static resource for Salesforce. 4.  And because Salesforce loads standard content and visualforce content on different sub-domains, I also enabled cross-domain tracking, which is a couple more lines of javascript we’ll see in the next step.

Create Static Resource

1.  We need to create a javascript file with your GA tracking code. We will upload this file as a Static Resource then reference it on all pages via custom home page sidebar component. Copy and paste the below gist into a file on your computer named GoogleAnalytics.js then replace the UA-xxx on line 16 with your GA tracking code and replace YOURDOMAIN on line 21 with your My Domain prefix. If you haven’t configured in Salesforce a custom domain, you might be able to just use your server instance (e.g. NA8 or CS7). Note, do not include or tags!


// hide sidebar component that embedded this javascript
$("h2:contains('Google Analytics')").parent().parent().hide();
// Google Universal Analytics (provided by google)
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
// Our analytics tracking id for salesforce production.
// We also enabled cross-domain linking plugins to try
// and handle that salesforce uses multiple sub-domains
// to render standard and visualforce content; we don't
// want the bounce arounds to be treated as separate "users"
// in the analytics reporting.
ga('create', 'UA-xxx', 'auto', {
'allowLinker': true
});
ga('require', 'linkid', 'linkid.js');
ga('require', 'linker');
ga('linker:autoLink', [/YOURDOMAIN(\.|—)(.)*\.(salesforce|force)\.com/]);
ga('send', 'pageview');

view raw

GoogleAnalytics.js

hosted with ❤ by GitHub

2.  Next we need to upload the file to Salesforce, go to Setup | Develop | Static Resources

3.  Click New button

4.  Name the resource GoogleAnalytics (one word, no spaces)

5.  Click Browse… button and select the javascript file you just created

6.  Set Cache Control to Public (read more about cache control)

7.  Click Save button

8.  Now, due to Salesforce limitation that Custom Link Home Page components do not have access to the $Resource merge field, we need to know the actual URL to the javascript file you uploaded. Click the View file link on the Static Resource page and copy just the relative path like /resource/1408249099000/GoogleAnalytics.js. That number is actually a date timestamp that Salesforce uses for caching purposes.

Create Home Page Custom Link

1.  Now we need to create a custom link to display in the sidebar that will load our Google Analytics resource so that tracking runs on every page. Go to Setup | Customize | Home | Custom Links

2.  Click New button

3.  Label it Google Analytics (this can have spaces)

4.  Change Behavior to Execute JavaScript

5.  Change Content Source to OnClick JavaScript (don’t worry, our solution doesn’t rely on user clicking this custom link)

6.  Copy and paste these two lines into the body of the custom link then replace the two red highlighted sections as appropriate. You’ll notice all we’re doing is including other javascript files via the {!REQUIRESCRIPT(..)} function, this is why the trick works immediately without the user have to actually “click” on this Custom Link – the scripts will be loaded when page loads. Also note, I’m including jQuery so that I can use it to hide the sidebar component that will contain this Custom Link (which is the first line of code in the GoogleAnalytics.js file)

  {!REQUIRESCRIPT("//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js")}
  {!REQUIRESCRIPT("/resource/1408255708000/GoogleAnalytics")}

7.  Click Save button

Create Home Page Component

1.  Go to Setup | Customize | Home | Home Page Components

2.  Click New button

3.  If prompted with overview page, click Next button

4.  Name the component Google Analytics (this is two words)

5.  Change Type to be Links

6.  Click Next button

7.  Choose your Google_Analytics link from the left list of options and move it to the right as the custom link to show in this new home page component

8.  Click Save button

9.  Next we need to actually add this home page component to a Home Page Layout(s) assigned to users we want to track. I recommend adding it to all layouts you use. Go to Setup | Customize | Home | Home Page Layouts

10. Click Edit button next to the layout you want to add the Google Analytics tracking to

11. Check the box next to Google Analytics

12. Click Next button

13. Click Save button

Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages

1.  Last but not least, go to Setup | Customize | User Interface

2.  Ensure the sidebar option “Show Custom Sidebar Components on All Pages” is checked