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MageBridge and monitoring tools

On many sites, tools like GoogleAnalytics, Woopra and GetClicky are used to gain insight into the behaviour of visitors. These are powerful marketing tools. But because MageBridge integrates two applications (Joomla! and Magento), the question pops up which application to monitor. Or should we monitor both? Let's take a closer look.

Which pages to monitor?

The most vital question here is: Which pages do you want to monitor? In most cases, the answer is going to be: All pages. In that cases, we have to realize that MageBridge is merging all Magento pages into Joomla!, but there are additional Joomla! pages as well. There for, the best option would be to monitor things from within Joomla!, and not from within Magento.

But the funny part is that actually a GoogleAnalytics block from Magento can still be loaded on all Joomla! pages, and be fully functional. So actually the MageBridge technology brings you a choice: You can either use a Joomla! extension or a Magento extension for exactly the same purpose.

So which one is better?

So the next question would be: Is the same extension for Magento better than the one for Joomla!? This depends. With Woopra for instance, you can track visitors and also add their username once they're logged in. But when an user logs into Joomla!, he/she also logs into Magento - MageBridge takes care of that. So with Woopra or GetClicky there's no difference.

With GoogleAnalytics however, you can also track conversion. But the conversion (the customer buys stuff) is actually taking place in Magento and not in Joomla!, so there for it is more usefull to apply GoogleAnalytics in Magento instead.

Installing the Magento block with MageBridge

To focus on a bit more technical stuff: Within Magento, the theme is built up using blocks (first defined in XML-code, then printed using PHTML-templates). Many of the tools like GoogleAnalytics add some scripts to the invisible bottom of the page - just before the body-tag is ending.

To merge the GoogleAnalytics block of Magento into Joomla!, the only thing you need to do is add a new instance of the MageBridge Custom Block module to the bottom of the page, and configure it to display the block Before Body End. Which Joomla! module position to choose depends on your template, but a lot of templates have a position debug which is just at the end of the page.