SEO Optimized DokuWiki: Google Analytics Integration

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool for analyzing website traffic. It is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that the product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service, currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites. This article covers how to integrate Google Analytics with DokuWiki.

The article is part of a series on how to optimize DokuWiki for best SEO results.

This article assumes that you already have a Google Analytics account.

On the overview tab, create a new profile by clicking the ”+Add new profile” link on the top right corner of the table:

Select “Add a Profile for a new domain” and enter your URL (not including any folders) and time zone of the Web site:

Example: if your wiki is installed in the subfolder on http://en.mystuff.com/wiki, enter www.mystuff.com as the URL.

Select “One domain with multiple subdomains” under “What are you tracking?” if you follow our setup with one subdomain per language (e.g. de.seowiki.info, en.seowiki.info, …):

Otherwise, the first option (“A single domain (default)”) should be the one to use.

Now, we need to integrate Google Analytics into the template, to allow tracking of visitors. There is no need for plugins to integrate Google Analytics (anymore). The integration is done in the following files:

• /lib/tpl/default/footer.html (just before <?php include(dirname(FILE).'/dwtb.html') ?>)
• /lib/tpl/default/mediamanager.php (just before </body>)

Add the integration code as provided by Google Analytics on the last screen. The code should look similar to the following:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("yourcode");
pageTracker._setDomainName(".yourdomain.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

Note that you should use the code as provided by Google Analytics (we have actually used the one provided by the “One domain with multiple subdomains” option on the page Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Tracking Code). The reason for this is that the code frequently changes and more importantly, you need to replace yourdomain.com and yourcode with actual values associated to your domain.

For best results, edit the Google Analytics profile to allow site search tracking and setup the default page, etc.

First, start editing the profile by clicking the “Edit” link on your profile:

Next, edit the “Main Website Profile Information” and setup the following information:

Hit “Save Changes” button and you have successfully setup site search and the default page of your DokuWiki installation.

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is more complicated for DokuWiki: DokuWiki fails to provide meaningful URLs that can be used to track those goals.

The first question to ask is what you goals are. In a wiki, typical goals could be

• user registration
• adding new content (either editing existing content or adding new content)
• upload images and other files
• time on site
• pages per visit
• outbound links

Tracking user registrations is tricky: because there is no URL for successful registrations, you need to use a trick for tracking it. However, this trick results in many registrations that are not being counted.

one solution to this problem is to add JavaScript handlers to the PHP source code (esp. the media manager upload button. See

• How do I set up goals and funnels for dynamically generated pages?
• How do I track JavaScript events?

for details

On the “Edit Profile” page, click “Add goal”:

Enter the following information on the next screen:

Hit “Save Goal” and you are done.

We added this goal not because it is possible to configure (yet). The problem (or actually advantage) with DokuWiki is that there is no special URL for the edit pages. Therefore, Google Analytics cannot identify edits.

What we would like to track is the number of contributions to the wiki. The most obvious way would be to track edits on the page.

See the following pages:

• How do I set up goals and funnels for dynamically generated pages?
• How do I track JavaScript events?

In order to track this goal, you need to make sure that you have modified mediamanager.php (see section before).

On the “Edit Profile” page, click “Add goal”:

Enter the following information on the next screen:

Hit “Save Goal” and you are done.

See the following pages:

• How do I set up goals and funnels for dynamically generated pages?
• How do I track JavaScript events?

The predefined Time on Site goal allows you to track your targeted visitor duration on your wiki. For example, if your goal is to keep visitors at least 10 minutes on the wiki, use the following setup:

Similar to Time on Site, you can track Pages per Visit. Use the following setup to target at least 5 page visits per visitor on your wiki:

For a solution, see How do I manually track clicks on outbound links?