I’m quite pleased with myself. I’ve manged to get google analytics to work on this WordPress blog.

I’ve used google analytics for almost a year, tracking my blogger blogs, my photography website and some of my clients sites.  By recording the number of hits and logging  where the traffic comes, it give the insight required to modify content and where best to increase the exposure that sites get. It’s this kind information that gives me the inspiration and motivation for doing more.

That said, it’s essential for me to do the same on the iDoStuff website and Blog.  This is how I did it:

I set up a new account within Google Analytics specific to the iDoStuff site.

This produces a few lines of code that needs to be added to each web page. No problem at all for the Website as there’s only one page. It will be a problem as the site expands so Ive got to research a way so the code goes where its need automatically.  This wasn’t the case with earlier versions as the code went in the root directory of site and did it’s magic from there.

With a Blog, manually putting the code on each page would be a nightmare, as pages are generated dynamically. After a brief search I found Ultimate Google Analytics. This is a small plug in that automatically adds the code to pages. The instructions are easy to follow and installation was relatively painless. The only tricky bit was using cPanel to copy the file in to the right directory and that was only because I hadn’t used it before, I learnt drag and drop doesn’t work.

Once in the right directory, WordPress picks it up and it’s available to install. The only set up necessary, although there’s plenty of bells and whistle to play with, is to add the reference number from Google analytics. 

I did this on Friday and checked Analytics on Monday to see if it had been picked up. It hadn’t so I checked a page by viewing the HTML and looking for the code, it was there right at the bottom of the page.  Analytics was telling me it hadn’t found the code, I searched around for solution and gave up, although the question had been asked a number of times, no useful answers are out there.  I logged back in to analytics a few hours latter and it was there, working.  So Patience is required!

To differentiate Web site Statistics from Blog Statistics, I created two profiles. The Google instruction are easy to follow to do this. Essentially one Website profile excludes any stats from sub-directories with/blogs/ in the URL and the Blog profile includes only /blogs/ Stats.

So now I can track how the site and blogs are doing in terms of visitors right from the big zero I have now.