Magic Moments: Adding your blog to Google Analytics

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As I said in my previous post, it’s very easy to add your blog to Google Analytics if you’ve got a WordPress.org blog. The ingredients you need are an appropriate plugin and a Google Account.

First, select a Google Analytics plugin. This can be done either by going straight to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins and typing in Google Analytics for WordPress in the search bar:

which brings up all the plugins related to this search. The top three I saw were:

and you can investigate them further by clicking on the title links and reading the information about them.

Once you’ve made your choice (I’ve used the top one), you can either download your plugin there and then, to upload into your plugins folder in your FTP platform, or you can upload it from your blog itself.

The latter is much easier, so go to the Plugin link located in the left hand sidebar and select the ‘Add New’ link from the extended menu.

It will bring up the page where you can search for your plugin via the request field:

and then automatically upload it into your plugin directory by clicking ‘Install Now”:

Your new plugin will be added to your plugin’s list where you can activate it by clicking on the ‘Activate’ link under its name.

But before you click on the ‘Settings’ link, you need to create a Google Analytics Account.

Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and click on the orange box ‘Create an account’. Follow the instructions (I haven’t time to go through it with you now) and you will end up with an entry for your blog that gives you a UA-code that is unique to your blog. It usually looks like this: UA-1234567-8 (obviously the numbers will be different). This UA-code is what you need to insert into the settings area of your Google Analytics plugin.

Copy your UA-code, log back into your blog, go to your plugin listings, locate the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin and click on ‘Settings’ link underneath its name to open your plugin’s settings page:

Click on the box next to ‘Manually enter your UA code’:

and paste in the UA-code you’ve copied from your Google Analytics account. Leave the location of the tracking code at default, and don’t forget to update your settings.

Now the code for your Google Analytics has automatically been placed on every page in your blog. It will start to record your blog’s statistics within 24 hours, and that is when the fun really starts!

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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott writes the award winning Fairy Blog Mother blog for beginner and post-beginner bloggers to “explain things really simply” about blogging and WordPress. She provides simple, easy to understand, highly visual courses and tutorials using ordinary, everyday words. Visit her new Beginner Bloggers blog to find her latest learning resources.