Sometimes Moodle’s reporting feature doesn’t do what you want it to. If that is the case for you a great tool for doing website usage analysis is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is now also available for intranets which means you can use it in Moodle.

First sign up for a Google Analytics account, select Add Website Profile and fill in the url to your Moodle installation. Then Analytics will give you a small piece of JavaScript code which it asks you to include in any pages you want tracked.

To add this to Moodle use the HTML block feature of your course:

select html block in Moodle

Then paste the code provided by Analytics into this block (keeping the block heading blank and making sure to toggle the html source button to code view):

paste google analyitics code into Moodle Block

Now position your block so that it is on the left right of the Moodle page and below all other blocks:

(Note: I updated this instruction thanks to taming Moodle. I think this was because my particular course did not have a third column. If you have three columns use the right-hand one).

blank Moodle html block

You may have to wait a few hours for Google Analytics to find and detect your Moodle site but once it does you will have a very powerful tool for monitoring all sorts of activity going on in Moodle.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a full blown tool for professional webmasters and marketeers. There is way too many features to go into here. It doesn’t track users like Moodle does and it relies on JavaScript which has accessibility implications. However what it does do is give very detailed results of page hits and very quickly unlike the Moodle reporting which can be slow to work with.