How to Install Analytics Tools and Make Sure You are GDPR Compliant

Posted by Kevin Stateri on February 26, 2026

Setting up an analytics tool (like Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity) for your store can be a great way to understand visitors to your web site, and in turn, maximize its potential. In this article I will discuss setting up a simple analytics system in OpenCart 3, some more involved alternatives, and GDPR compliance.

First, to get started, you will need to sign up with an analytics platform such as Google Analytics or Microsoft Clarity. In this step it would be good to have an understanding of what specifically you want to achieve by using an analytics tool, including what data you want to collect, and find a tool that can achieve it.

Once you have a specific tool, you will likely be given a "tracking snippet" or some other short JavaScript program that, when run as part of a page, will enable the tracking. This must be placed on your site to allow functionality of the JavaScript code.

OpenCart 3 analytics extension: By default you can use the "Google Analytics" Extension under "Extensions" -> Extensions -> Analytics. This default extension accepts one tracking snippet to be displayed across all pages. This however is only capable of safely handle one script, and if the tracking script you use does anything more than logging user visits with no other information it may run into GDPR issues.

For these reasons, we would recommend our own extension GDPR-Friendly Cookie Consent Manager for OpenCart, an extension used to add any number of tracking snippets to your site, and providing an interface for users to provide cookie consent information so that you can be sure of GDPR compliance.

For more on GDPR compliance, please see our blog post on it.

If you would rather opt for a more personalised analytics solution, such as using custom tags in Google Tag Manager to more closely understand customer behaviour, we would be happy to help!