How to Add Live Chat to my website? Integrate Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics

Google started to provide a free web analytics solution in 2005, allowing owners of websites to monitor and understand the types of traffic and visitors that came to their website. This solution has developed over the past 10 years into an awesome system that can provide you with all sort of useful metrics.

• How visitors arrive on your website – via a search engine, social media, paid advertising

• The visitor’s journey – which pages they look at, how long they spend on the page

• Conversions – how many goals have been achieved (items purchased, downloads, request for information etc.)

All that’s required to take advantage of this useful system is to create a free account  and add a small piece of Javascript into your webpages, this script will “push” information into Google Analytics for each visitor as they browse your website, allowing you to run numerous reports and charts on historic information.

We have only touched on the basics, but recommend you to carry out some further reading here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics

Why use GA in your chat windows?

Google Analytics can provide a central repository to store information about visitor activities on your website, and provides flexibility allowing you to “push” various events into the system. These events can then be queried to find out more in-depth information about the actual visitor.

Within a chat solution, various events could be recorded within GA, for example:

• A visitor engages in a chat

• A visitor leaves a message – your staff were not available

• A visitor clicks on a chat button but does not start a chat

In a quality chat system there are usually many different windows, for example: the window that appears when the button is clicked and your staff are available which gathers information before a chat starts (pre-chat), or that appears when your staff are not available (offline), the actual chat window itself (dialogue), and usually 1 or more surveys that are presented once the chat has finished.

All if these different windows have the ability to “push” events into Google Analytics by adding a small piece of Javascript into the window. There are only a few chat solutions that provide this type of functionality, so ensure you pick the right one.

Here is an example of the script you would add to the chat window:

What information GA can give you

Once you have setup your events, Google Analytics will start recording these activities allowing you to running reports almost instantly.

These are just a couple of examples of information that can be gained from Google Analytics, dimensions such as Acquisition, Paid Advertising, Visitor Behaviour, Social Media and User data can be reported on.

Using Google tagManager

Google also provide a free tool allowing you to add various scripts into your website without having to edit your own website.

Basically, Google provides a script that you add to your website, this script then uses their tagManager system to inject other scripts into your website. These other scripts are added within the tagManager console which remains totally separate from your website code. Using this system the following well known features can be added easily:

• Google Analytics

• Conversion Tracking

• Remarketing

• And yes…, live chat.

A good chat provider should provide you with simple instructions on how to add their chat button script into tagManager. If you already using tagManager on your website it means you don’t have to change or add a single piece of script to your website to have live chat functionality.

Conclusion

You may not have considered integration with Google Analytics when you first started to explore how to add live chat to your website. We hope this article has explained the basics and given you some ideas how useful information can be gained.

Although a good chat system should provide a decent level of information relating to chats, it should also have the ability to simply work alongside platforms such as GA which you may use already for your website statistics