Web Analytics on Multilingual Sites

The main challenge when implementing analytics tracking on multilingual sites are the extra characters which certain languages contain, for example: à, á, â, ã, ä, å and æ. These characters may appear in the URL of a website – in Analytics we will often want to break down parts of a URL. Sometimes we will want to capture parts of a URL query string, a fragment identifier (#) or maybe even split the URL to retrieve information from the URL structure.

There are numerous blog posts to aid in splitting by ?, # or / so we won’t go into it now.

It is important to remember, however, is that the URL may be encoded – to allow for special characters. This is particularly true for sites in languages which are reserved.

Fortunately PHP provides us with urldecode to convert our character back.

This is crucial within Web Analytics where we want to avoid duplicate data as much as possible, for example: Wei%C3%9Fbier is not the same as Weißbier.