Many of the experts we follow suggest to tract and monitor your website traffic.

One of the tools to do this is Google Analytics. Our guest author Geek Entrepreneur (a.k.a. Wesley Craig Green), describes in the following article to how install Google Analytics onto your WordPress blog.

In this article, there is mention of a WordPress plugin which you can install. A point to note is that if you go to the WordPress plugins page and search for Google Analytics, you will find several plugins there which you can use.

Enjoy!

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How To Install Google Analytics

Author: Geek Entrepreneur

Do you know how many new and regular visitors your blog is receiving on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis? What pages or posts are receiving the most views? Where are your visitors coming from? These questions are imperative to the success of your blog, and discovering the answers can be found easily by using Google Analytics. In this article, you will learn how you can install Google Analytics on your blog, web site, or WordPress-powered blog.

What Is Google Analytics & How Do I Get It?

If you are like me, the thought of analyzing and tracking your blog’s visitors and regulars sounds about as fun as going to the dentist. But using Google Analytics makes this a painless and surprisingly interesting part of blogging.

Simply put, Google Analytics tracks information regarding visitors to your blog or web site. The amount of information Google Analytics generates is outstanding! Once you get Google Analytics set-up, I suggest you take an hour or two just to explore your Google Analytics account.

To sign-up for Google Analytics, just go to Google (or any search engine) and do a search on “google analytics”. Click on the URL for the Google Analytics homepage and create your account there. If you already have a Google account (like a Gmail account) then you can just use it to sign-up with. Once you have created your account, you will have to enter some information regarding your blog or web site. Doing this will provide Google the information it needs to generate some code which Google needs to access once you install it in your blog or web site.

Installing Google Analytics on a WordPress blog

If you use WordPress, installing Google Analytics is just a matter of copying and pasting a bit of code (provided to you when you signed-up for Google Analytics) into the footer.php file BEFORE the ending BODY tag. You can access the footer.php file by going to your WordPress Dashboard, going to Appearance, then opening the Editor. Once there, you can open your footer.php file and copy and paste the code there as I instructed above.

Checking To Make Sure It Works

To ensure you installed the code in the right spot, simply go back to your Google Analytics account. Next to your blog’s URL should be “Tracking Data”. If that isn’t there, then something’s wrong. I suggest waiting an hour or so to give Google time to do its magic. If that doesn’t work, then delete the coding you had installed, and then copy and paste the coding again, making sure all of the code is copied in case you missed something last time.

If everything is working, then Google Analytics is already working behind-the-scenes, collecting and deciphering tons of data which it turns into somewhat easy-to-understand language for us to keep tabs on as we manage our blog.

Using The Google Analytics WordPress Plug-in

There is a free Google Analytics WordPress plug-in from Semiologic which is very handy. It doesn’t provide you all the information which is available from your Google Analytics account page but it does provide enough to give you short overview of what is going on with your blog stats wise. The only catch with using the plug-in is it only works if you are using the old legacy urchin.js script instead of the new and improved ga.js script which is what you will get if you create a new Google Analytics account. But if you have been running your WordPress blog for a while and already have Google Analytics setup for it, then it may be worth your while to download the plugin (http://www.semiologic.com/software/google-analytics/).

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-articles/how-to-install-google-analytics-1499734.html

About the Author

The Geek Entrepreneur is Wesley Craig Green, an entrepreneur who is a publisher, owner of an online classified ads network of sites, two web sites focusing on independent and digital comics and graphic novels. You can learn more about me at my Geek Entrepreneur blog which is dedicated to entrepreneurship, blogging, inspiration, technology, and small business.