Google Analytics For Your WordPress Site

Posted by Madhavi on Dec 28, 2011 in Featured, WordPress 101 | 0 comments

Google Analytics is a great way to measure the success of your website. You can know how many people visited your site over a given period of time, and also how they arrived at your website in the first place. With tons of different metrics that will inform you about your website’s reach, Google Analytics is great addition to any website out there.

When you have a WordPress website, integrating it is ever so easy. Today, lets talk about why Google Analytics is very important, and how you can go about adding the Google Analyticator plugin to your website to give you all the important analytics information right in your WordPress Dashboard.

Google Analytics is a very handy tool that is brought to us by Google (an amazing Search Engine on the Internet), and it helps provide website owners and admins with a ton of analytics and metrics about their websites.

Google Analytics: What Information Do You Get?

A quick list of the different metrics provided by Google Analytics includes:

Information about the visitors to your website, including new and returning visitors
Information of their visit length, i.e. how long they stayed and browsed around on your website
Information about the traffic sources, i.e. which sites and links led them to your website
Google AdWords that led them to your website
If you’ve set up Goals, then you can learn about their conversion ratio
The browsers and operating systems are typically used by your site’s visitors
The geographical location of your site’s visitors
The pages and blog posts that your visitors saw / read
If your visitors searched for something on your site, then what they searched for and where it led to
If you’ve set up Events, then you can learn about their effectiveness
If your site is an e-commerce site, then you can see the effectiveness of the transactions
If you have set up any other custom variables, then you can track their effectiveness
You can see the traffic metrics based on a date range, or on a particular day etc.

Google Analytics: Integrating it in Your Website

Normally, in order to integrate Google Analytics into a website, one is provided with a code snippet which one has to add to each and every page and blog post of one’s website. The presence of that code is what ensures that Google Analytics measures the number of people who visit your page or blog post, and who click on the links that you have put in there and so forth.

When you create a WordPress website however, it is not that easy to add this kind of a code directly into your pages and blog posts. Naturally, we WordPress-ers have Plugins to rescue us!

If you search out there, you will find a number of Google Analytics plugins that were created especially for WordPress. However, there is one amazing plugin that I use, and I most certainly recommend to all my clients. And that plugin is the Google Analyticator.

Google Analytics for WordPress – The Google Analyticator Plugin

The Google Analyticator plugin allows you to easily integrate your Google Analytics account with your WordPress website. The plugin takes care of adding the code to all your WordPress website’s pages and blog posts. Not only that, it also gives you a little peek into your stats by putting a little widget right into your WordPress website’s Dashboard!

Just to make things simple, here’s a video that will explain how to install and set up the Google Analyticator Plugin.

Here, you can see how to set up a Google Analytics account in the first place, and then install the plugin and set it up in your WordPress website.

In Conclusion…

Google Analytics is a great way of tracking your website’s reach and effectiveness, along with tons of other metrics. And integrating it with your WordPress website is just as easy with the Google Analyticator Plugin.

So, have you installed it already? What are your thoughts? Please share in the comments section below.