Getting the analytics information about your blog or website is of tremendous importance, for commercial and non commercial reasons. At this game, Google Analytics is really the best player in town! Google has the best tools, the best reputation and they can also get you more information than most other aggregators.
With Google Analytics, you get to know your users and their browsers of choice, the places they come from, age, and to an extent, their interests, lifestyle and so on.
So the “why”, in why you should add Google Analytics to your blog is pretty much self explanatory, so we’ll focus on the “how”!
In fact, this is one of the easiest blog tweaks out there and we’re pretty sure it won’t take you more than a minute. Here’s the steps:
Visit your Google Analytics account
Don’t know how to get there? Visit this link. If you don’t already have an account, set one up. It’s as easy as setting up an email account.
After you’re signed up you’ll get a Javascript code snippet, which is a tracking code. The code needs to be inserted into any and all pages that you want to keep track of.
How do you do that? Very simple, you need to edit your header.php file.
The code is specific to every user, so copy it, and then paste in under the <body> tag. Update your file next.
If you’ve pasted the code without errors, you will see that your Tracking ID is switched on to “receiving Data”. However, you can do a simple test to see if it is all working properly:
Testing
Visit your Google Analytics account and click on the Admin button. Next, click the tracking info button.
Then you will see a tab button – “Reporting”. Usually, the information starts pouring in about 12 hours after the set-up, so you might want to give it some time to fill with information, but for websites/blogs with a lot of traffic it can start displaying in a matter of hours or even less.
The plugin method!
If you don’t want to mess with your header file, you can just as easily visit the Google Analytics + page which is also home to the Analytics plugin you need to get the analytics info.
Some might even like this version better, since it displays information via charts and graphs and it also has its own dashboard. It’s also pretty well produced with individual post analytics or it can upscale to display analytics for entire networks of WordPress blogs.
To get information about multiple blogs at the same time, you need to add the account ID’s of these websites/blogs, and the information will be collected from them all.