Sitecore 6 has some awesome sexy cool analytics under the moniker of the Customer Engagement Platform (CEP), the Online Marketing Suite (OMS), and Engagement Analytics. My business development manager was keen to get our site hooked up with this goodness so I set about trying to install it from within Sitecore itself, thinking it may be a package. After a lot of head scratching I found analytics, while hyped as the best selling point of Sitecore, is not installed out of the box! Off to the SDN I went and grabbed the copy for my version of Sitecore from here.
Thinking about it, it’s not an insane idea to not install out of the box. A lot of customers may already be experienced with Google Analytics and prefer to use that, also Sitecore Analytics comes with a performance hit. That, and the Analytics data is stored in a separate database that can be used by multiple sites and Sitecore installations.
Grab the Sql Server installation for the DMS from the above link, unzip and attach to your Sql Server instance.
The next step is to enable analytics within your Sitecore site. This is done via config files. The documentation here talks about the web.config file, which lead me astray for a while before finding that there are separate analytics config files linked to the web config file. I probably should have paid more attention to the documentation, which clearly states this up at the top.
The Sitecore.Analytics.config and Sitecore.Analytics.ExcludeRobots.config are both included in the DMS download and should be copied into your Siteocre App_Config/Include folder for your site.
Once those are in place you need to open Sitecore.Analytics.config and find the Analytics.Enabled setting and set it to true (or at least verify it is set to true).
<!-- ANALYTICS ENABLED
Determines if analytics is enabled or not.
Default: true
-->
<setting name="Analytics.Enabled" value="true" />
Once that’s done, touch your web.config and go back into Sitecore and to the Enagement Analytics module. Your site is now ready to start capturing site visits and analysing visitors activity on your site.
