The Intelligence installation process is designed to walk you through setting up actionable, results oriented analytics on your website. The first step is to install the files and activate the plugin like any other WordPress plugin. Once active, you can access the built-in setup wizard which will walk you through configuring Intelligence enhanced Google Analytics.
This document is designed to help you through plugin installation and provide additional background on configuration steps in the setup wizard.
Core Plugin Installation
The first step is to install the core Intelligence plugin using WordPress. The core plugin can be found on WordPress.org at:
wordpress.org/plugins/intelligence/
The plugin can be installed like any other plugin from WordPress.org. If you are unfamiliar with installing plugins, see WordPress’ Managing Plugins page.
Once you have the plugin files loaded on your site and have activated the plugin via the WordPress plugin admin, launch the Intelligence setup wizard. You can launch the setup wizard using the alert at the top of the plugin admin or via any Intelligence admin menu link.
If when accessing Intelligence admin pages you get an error: “Fatal error: session_start(): Failed to initialize storage module:…” this means your server is not setup for session storage. To fix this, install the WordPress Native PHP Session plugin.
Setup Wizard
The setup wizard walks you through the essential configuration of Intelligence and Google Analytics. It breaks the process down into discrete steps that verify proper configuration along the way.
While you need to complete the wizard before accessing all of Intelligence’s features, you do not need to complete the wizard all at once. The wizard will save your completed steps. You can resume where you left off next time you launch the wizard.
Once the wizard is complete, you can go back and make changes to prior steps. This is particularly useful if you add Intelligence add-on supported plugins or add trackable entities such as new webforms to your site.
Required Dependencies
The first steps of the setup wizard walks you through installing and configuring required plugins and services. Plugins are code you install in your website, where services are external platforms that need to be integrated into your site.
The only required module is the Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress plugin. This plugin enables your WordPress site to access Google Analytics data and generate reports. You need to install the plugin and link it to your Google Analytics account.
The two required services are Google Analytics and the Intelligence API. Google Analytics is where you will store data and access standard analytics reports. The Intelligence API is a service that wraps around Google Analytics to enable enhanced data.
Google Analytics profile setup
Intelligence stores analytics data in a specially configured enhanced Google Analytics profile. Google Analytics has a feature to let you track data in multiple properties at the same time on the same website. Intelligence leverages this feature to enable you to maintain a base GA profile with standard GA tracking in parallel with enhanced Intelligence tracking in a separate GA profile.
You will want to setup two GA properties when installing Intelligence. If you have an existing GA property for your site, use that one for your base property. If you have not yet created any GA properties for your site, create a new one for your base property. Once you have your base property setup, create a second property to track Intelligence data.
To learn more about how to setup Google Analytics profiles, check out this article by OnlineMetrics.
Tips for setting up GA profiles:
- For the Intelligence property name, use the name of the base property followed by “Intelligence”. E.g. if your base property is name “example.com”, name the Intelligence property “example.com Intelligence”
- Create a second view inside your Intelligence property named “Intelligence (All Website Data)”
- If an existing Google Analytics property already exists on a site that you do not have adequate access to, review our Google Analytics profile setup recommendations.
Intelligence API setup
In order to use Intelligence, you will need an API key that is linked to your Intelligence Google Analytics profile. This is done by creating a property in the Intelligence API admin. The Setup Wizard will walk you through how to set this up.
Additionally, when you create an Intelligence API property and link it to a GA property, the API will automatically configure custom dimension and metrics on your GA property to work with Intelligence enhanced data.
API Authorization
Intelligence integrates data from multiple sources, primarily; Google Analytics, Intelligence API and WordPress (via the Intelligence plugin). This is done through APIs that must be authorized to talk to each other.
To generate analytics reports within WordPress, your site must authenticate to use the Google Analytics Data API. This is done when you complete the setup of the Google Analytics Dashboard for WordPress plugin configuration.
The Intelligence API automates the configuration of your GA profile. Access for doing this is done when you setup a property in the Intelligence API admin.
Finally, the Intelligence plugin communicates with the Intelligence API via an API key, which is generated when you create an Intelligence API property.
Add-Ons
Once the core Intelligence dependencies are configured, you have a powerful framework for tracking valuable interactions on your site. Add-ons extend that framework to enable tracking specific to your website.
Most add-ons provide additional tracking and data integration with other WordPress plugins or 3rd party services. For example, the Gravity Forms Intelligence add-on enables tracking of Gravity Forms submissions.
The wizard will analyze your installed plugins and provide recommendations for additional add-ons to install to provide additional tracking.
Based on the add-ons you install, you may be presented with additional options in the setup wizard to configure your add-ons.
Often add-ons create new Intelligence events for your site that can be used to track additional interactions and trigger goals.
Goals
Goals are at the heart of implementing a results oriented Google Analytics measurement plan. To achieve maximum flexibility, Intelligence Goals are specially configured to be triggered via Intelligence Events. The goals page in the setup wizard automates the process of setting up these specially formulated goals, rather than having to do it manually within the Google Analytics admin.
Creating goals in the setup wizard, only creates them in Google Analytics. You will need to configure how to trigger these goals. A common way to do this is via events, either provided by add-ons or the custom created in the Intelligence event admin. Another common interaction for triggering goals are form submissions, which can be configured on the Form settings step in the setup wizard.
Scoring
Once you have setup the goals and events you want to track, you can set the value for each one. These values are added up to determine your site and site component scores.
Coming up with good values can be challenging. Feel free to leave the default values to start, you can refine the value later.