Enabling Google Analytics for your help center

What's my plan?

You can use Google Analytics to track your help center traffic. Google Analytics is a third-party, non-Zendesk service.

Note: If you previously obtained the JavaScript snippet from Google Analytics and manually added it to your help center pages, you should remove it before enabling the settings described in this article.

This article covers the following topics:

• Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 360 end of life
• Adding your help center to Google Analytics
• Alternative analytics for your help center
• Supporting opt-outs

Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 360 end of life

Google is sunsetting Google Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023 and Google Analytics 360 July 1, 2024. This means that Google Universal Analytics users who want to continue using Google Analytics must migrate to Google Analytics 4 prior to that time.

Data from Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 360 is not migrated to Google Analytics 4 dashboards. Therefore, Google recommends that you run Google Analytics 4 alongside Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 360 to ensure you’ll have historical data in Google Analytics 4 when Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 360 stop processing data. To use both Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 to monitor your help center, you must add both tracking IDs (see Adding your help center to Google Analytics).

Adding your help center to Google Analytics

To use Google Analytics to track your help center traffic, you must set up your Google Analytics account and then add your Google Analytics tracking ID to the help center.

To set up your Google Analytics account

To track traffic via Google Analytics, establish a Google Analytics account (if you don’t already have one), then add your help center to that account.

For instructions on each of these tasks, refer to Google’s support documentation for your Google Analytics platform:

• [GA4] Set up Analytics for a website and/or app
• Set up Analytics for a website (Universal Analytics)

To add your tracking ID to the help center

1. In Guide admin, click the Settings icon () in the sidebar.
2. Under Integrations, select the option to enable Google Analytics and enter your tracking ID.
   Note: If you are transitioning from Google Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, you must add the tracking ID for both products. If you are only using Google Analytics 4, you can just add the Google Analytics 4 tracking ID.
   
3. Click Update on the upper-right side of the page.

Alternative analytics for your help center

If you're not using Google Analytics, you can implement any tracking code directly in the code of your theme by pasting the tracking code snippet into the document_head.hbs theme template file. This is available if you are on Guide Professional or higher or Suite Growth or higher and have converted your theme to a custom theme.

You can also use Google Tag Manager to implement your tags see Using Google Tag Manager with your help center.

Note: Enabling an alternative analytics tool in addition to Google Analytics can result in a duplication implementation of analytics.

Supporting opt-outs

Laws in certain jurisdictions (for example, the California Consumer Privacy Act) may require that end users be given the opportunity to opt-out of Google Analytics or other third-party tracking, including through the use of a universal opt-out mechanism such as Global Privacy Control (GPC). For more information on ways to comply with these requirements, see Implementing cookie consent in your help center.