Beginner Blogger

Tracking what your visitors do on your blog is important in understanding your readers. Knowing where your visitors come from, what they click on, how long they stay on your site, what sites they go to next are all very valuable pieces of information to know.

One way in which you can track all this data (and for free) is with Google Analytics. Today I wanted to show you how I set  up Google Analytics to track the statistics of beginner blogger.

How to set up Google Analytics on your blog

Step 1 – Sign up to a Google Analytics account

Head over to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and click on ‘Sign Up Now’. If you don’t already have a Google account you will have to set one up. Just follow the simple process that Google provides to set up a Google Analytics account.

Step 2 – Complete the Google Analytics sign up process

Here you will add your website address, the account name you with to give your site (doesn’t have to be the actual website address, I could have callled it ‘Beginner Blogger’ or ‘What’s New Pussy Cat’ – the choice is yours ).

You will also set your country and timezone – this is so (I believe) the stats shown in your time so you can see where you get the most visitors during a day based on your timezone.

You will then enter in some basic contact information and need to accept the User Agreement which you should give a quick read over.

After all that we get to the nitty gritty – getting the tracking to place into your blog/website!

Step 3 – Place Google Analytics tracking code into your blog/website

When you get to the final step of the sign up process you will get to a page that looks like the above picture. It displays the tracking code that needs to be placed just before the closing body tag in your website.

Copy the code required and go into your blogging software to place the code before the closing body tag. In my case I use the WordPress blogging software and this is how I placed the tracking code into my website.

After logging into my WordPress account I go to Appearance > Editor. This is where I can edit the code of my blog directly.

I then selected Footer (footer.php) from the Templates list and pasted the Google Analytics tracking code directly before the closing body tag. Most sites these days have their own footer file which is seen on every page across the entire site.

The reason you place the Google Analytics tracking code in the footer and behind closing body tag is because you want the page to load for the visitor before the tracking code is signalled back to Google Analytics. You don’t want to track visits where someone may accidently open your site then close it right away before the page loads. You would rather track more meaningful traffic data based on real people that visit and use your website.

Step 4 – Check your analytics stats to see if your site is active yet

Once you have entered the Google tracking data and saved the footer file (or whatever file you have entered the tracking code to) you unfortunatley won’t be able to track stats right away. You need to wait until the status has shown up a green tick signalling that the tracking code has been successfully entered and is tracking accurately. This can take up to 24 hours.

You can see in the above pictures that when you first install Google Analytics it will display an explanation mark indicating that analytics is not tracking data yet. Once analytics is ready to track data a green tick will appear indicating your Google Analytics code has been installed correctly and is ready to track your visitors stats!

Well done you can now track what your visitors are up to when they visit your site. This is a great way to analyse the way visitors use your site and a great tool in improving your blog to adjust to your readers needs.

I hope this little tutorial has helped you install Google Analytics. If you have any problems please let me know by either contacting me or writing in the comments section below.

If you enjoyed this blog post here are a few more that you may also enjoy:

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – Aug-Sept 09

How to Submit Your Site to Google so you rank in Google Search Results

Beginner Blogger Stats and Goals – July-Aug 09

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