Adding Google analytics to your Wordpress blog
Sign Up
Google Analytics is a great resource for anyone who runs a website. It is free to use and the statistics that it provides you with are very eye opening. The first step is signing up and it is totally free just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ to sign up if you already have a gmail account it will add analytics to your Google account.
Add your website’s profile
After signing up the next step is to add your website’s profile to your analytics account. Once you are logged into your account there is an option on the bottom left to Add Website Profile. On the next page all you have to do is enter your websites URL into the form and hit finish. On the next page you will be given the java script code that you need to add to your website. Highlight this code and copy it to the clipboard.
Add the code to your site
The next step will be to add this to your Wordpress blog. Google recommends adding the code right before the </body> tag on every page of your site. Luckily, if you are using Wordpress, this means just pasting the code into one file. So login to your Wordpress blog’s admin area and then go to Design > Theme Editor. Once you are at the Theme Editor page you will see an area on the right that reads Theme Files and below that are a list of… your theme’s files (imagine that). The file you want to edit is footer.php so click on that and then scroll to the bottom of that file. Once you are at the bottom look for the HTML tag </body> and click on a blank line right above that and paste the Google Analytics code right there and then save the file.
On some web hosts you can’t edit your Wordpress theme files directly in Wordpress unless you have your permissions on your theme file set to 777, which is a security risk and if that is the case with your host you should FTP into your account and download footer.php, copy the Google Analytics code into the file, save it, and then upload it back to your host. The theme files are in your /wordpress/wp-content/themes/yourcurrenttheme and then grap the footer.php file from that folder.
So once you have Google Analytics what can you do with it? Here are some screenshots of the analytics dashboard.
As you can see Google analytics will show you the number of visits, page views, which pages people visit, how long they stay, and tons of other information. It is useful to know which part of your site that people are interested in that way you can keep those the same and improve other areas that don’t get as much traffic. There is even a website optimizer that will let you try out different content on your site to see which works out better.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
very cool! I can’t wait to use it~!
it is odd though, I can’t find the theme editor @_@ From design, the choices I get are: Themes, Widgets, Extras, Custom Image Header, and Edit CSS.
here is what I see in my wordpress dashboard:
http://img205.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wordpressqz6.png
[an aside: I see you're into mmos! have you tried guildwars? (although it doesn't have a persistent world like most mmos... very similar to diablo actually...but the pvp was really intense when it first released !)]
August 28th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
I guess you can’t edit your theme if you have a wordpress.com hosted blog. However, you can use this plugin to add it http://boakes.org/analytics
August 29th, 2008 at 6:27 am
I think to use plugins you need to have a host for the blog because it asks me to insert the code in the directory wp-content/plugins (guessing that I have to upload it). I shall look and see if there is another way to use the google analytics service!
thanks for the help !
-Matt