Have you setup your WordPress blog? Now, it’s time to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog to track your visitors activity, which is a free tool provided by Google. The best way to make popular your website is to know more about your audience such as from where they are coming, what is the top landing pages of your blog, social media impact on your blog and your search, referral and direct traffic? That is why Google Analytics comes to the picture and helps you to know more about your audience. Therefore, here is how to add Google Analytics to WordPress. Let’s talk why Google Analytics is important for bloggers?
Google Analytics for WordPress, Image credit: yoast.com
Why Should We Install Google Analytics for WordPress Blog
- Real Time (Beta): You can track your visitors in the real time such as from where they are coming, locations and which pages they are currently reading on. You can track their activities as per minute or per second basis. The last 30 minutes activity included in the real time of Google Analytics.
- Visitors Overview: How many peoples visited the site in the custom date range? you can easily track it even with the graph, including unique visitors, pageviews, pages/visit, average visit duration, Bounce rate, %new visits. You can also look at demographics (as your visitors language, country and city), system (as browser, operating system with screen resolution and ISP) and Mobile traffic (as installed operating system, service provider and screen resolution)
- Custom variables: If you are using Google Analytics for your WordPress blog, then you can easily create custom variables to track your specific visitors such as logged in users and pageviews per post type/author name/tags/categories.
- Tracking outbound links and Downloads: You can easily track all of your WordPress outbound links and downloads. You don’t need to have any knowledge to create this segment just simple click required. I have mentioned it in the below part of this article.
- Traffic Sources: In the traffic sources overview you can track your search engines, direct and referrals traffic. You can easily comparison the result among them. You can even track the search engine’s queries by which users visit your site.
- Adsense in Google Analytics: I like this feature of Google Analytics by which you can track your Google Adsense earning as per post basis. Look at your blog pages and check out that which pages give you the more revenue from Adsense and try to write more about that topic to earn more.
- Content Overview: By the content overview, you can track your top landing pages and exit pages by the URL or Title name. Site speed is also a factor in SEO, you can track your site speed in the content overview and how your visitors search your site.
There are so many advantages to have a Google Analytics account for WordPress. You can read more about Analytics on the official site. I am also using this plugin for my WordPressians blog. Here I am talking about to install Google Analytics on WordPress blog.
How To Add Google Analytics To WordPress Blog
- Sign into Google Analytics with your Gmail account, and if you using Google Analytics first time then you will see “Start using Google Analytics” now click on Sign up. If you don’t have any Gmail account, create new account first.
- When you signed up, as shown in the image below write your account name, website’s URL, time zone, sharing setting and your country.
Now, scroll down the page and you have to agree terms and conditions, and finally click on Create Account. - When you created account, Google Analytics will ask you to add tracking code into the <head> section of your pages. Therefore, if your blog is hosted on Blogger or any other platform you use, copy the tracking code and paste it into your source code immediately before the closing </head> tag. If you are using Self Hosted WordPress blog, I recommend you to use Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin, which has more than 3 millions download. Download it to your desktop and then install this plugin to your WordPress and activate it.
- When you activated Google Analytics Plugin, go to Settings » Google Analyticsand click on “click here to authenticate with Google” while you are logged in with your Google Analytics account. It will prompt you to authenticate your Google Analytics account with your Google Analytics yoast plugin so simply click on Grant access.
- When you grant accessed your Analytics account, you will redirect to the setting page of Analytics plugin. As shown in the image below, select your profile, and I would not recommend you to choose manually enter your UA code to your theme because ‘in the header” which is default for the plugin, is best. If you want to track your outbound clicks and downloads, you can tick on it, and later you can access it into your Analytics account by going to content » event tracking. Similar, if you want to show advanced settings, click on it and finally click on Update Google Analytics Settings ».
- If you have choosen advanced settings, you will have an option to set your custom variable settings as mention below,Choose what do you want to track with Analytics account. Here I want to track category pages not tag pages, so I have ticked only on category pages, but you can go with both. Later, you can access it into your Analytics account by going to visitors » custom variables. Finally, click on Update Google Analytics Settings ».
- These are the main options inside this plugin. You can leave all the options as default otherwise choose as your need. Take at least 24 hours to grab your WordPress blog statistics in Google Analytics.
- To confirm the installation of your Google Analytics account with your WordPress, wait at-least 24 hours and go to Google Analytics Admin panel, and click on associated account name of your WordPress blog. Again, click on name associated with your WordPress blog URL. Now, click on Tracking Code, you can see your Tracking status. If your tracking status is “Receiving Data”, you have successfully installed Google Analytics to your WordPress blog.
- If your WordPress blog is new, I recommend you to first concern to build your audience, write quality content and drive traffic to your blogs. When you have decent traffic then add your Adsense account with Google Analytics to track your earning stats by going to Google Analytics Admin panel, and click on associated account name of your WordPress blog. Now, click on Data Sources tab as shown in the below image,click on Adsense tab, and finally click on “Link Accounts” to link you existing Adsense account. Similarly, you can add your Adwords account to Google Analytics.
[VIDEO]: Install Google Analytics to WordPress via Google Analytics WordPress Plugin by Yoast
This is a live video to install Google Analytics on this blog, hope this video would help you.
Great Article…. Very Informative …. Thanks.
Love this edu-video. Following along nicely, but when I get to the end of step 4, where I should authenticate with Google, I get a blank Google page with “invalid token” in the upper left corner.
I have tried closing the browser (firefox), I am already signed into my gmail account and still, this keeps tripping me up. Help please.
He Anne,
Have you successfully created your Google Analytics account? If yes, then try to remove the associated analytics plugin and re-install and activate it. For doing it easily, you may check our live video. If you will have the same problem, then let me know deeply.
Best Regards!
Thanks for your quick reply.
I do have a Google Account.
I did delete the plugin and started over.
I am still getting the same message.
Might the cause be that my version of WP is not the latest? I have 3.3.1
(To update this, I must also update my PHP version, and for that, I have asked someone for help.)
Anne
May be it is due to the old version of WordPress. I am running the latest version 3.4.2, as I know, I have updated the latest version without updating myPHP. It was automatically for me. For you, it may be due to your hosting server services. You can clearly see, there was no problem to installing this plugin on my blog mentioned in the video that was a live video.
Asking questions are in fact pleasant thing if you are not understanding
anything totally, however this post presents good understanding even.