Will Google Analytics work on an intranet?
It needs Internet access to report to Google, but that part is clear, isn't it?
Yes, it should work on an intranet, too.
We don't simply put a GA pagetracker script into each topic, but do the reporting manually, once the page tracker is instantiated. A page view, for instance, is tracked in <projectname>_navigation.js in the script "track()" as a "topic" tracking event. The script receives the full url of the topic and removes everything before the first slash "/" to report the remaining url as a page view. One could easily tweak this here.
When your Webhelp is, for instance on
http://192.0.0.5/local/help/index.html, you might want to not only strip "http://192.0.0.5" from the location that is tracked, but rather the entire location "http://192.0.0.5/local/help". That could be done by tweaking the script above.
One thing I do not know yet, however, is whether Google checks if the script is running on the web or locally. GA could refuse to track anything that comes from a different location than the url you specify in your GA account. I am not sure about this. Has anyone tried it?