How to Install Google Analytics Tracking into a WordPress Web Site

This is a follow up article for the how do I start a successful blog series that we have been publishing on this site to help users get started and create a successful blog.

Google Analytics (GA) is the de facto standard for tracking the statistics for properties on the web. It is free to use and is constantly being improved upon. It ties into many of the Google accounts that marketers and web masters use which includes Google AdWords and Google Webmaster Tools.

The reports in GA will let you know what pages on your web site get the most (and least) traffic and how the traffic reached the pages. You can learn the referring URL for the traffic, meaning what web site (if any) contained the link that lead to the page on your site. If the referring site was a search engine, a lot of times you can learn the keyword that was used to find your listing in the search results. When setup correctly it can also differentiate between organic and paid traffic.

More than the above, you can also learn the geographic location of your visitors, and the path they took through your site. And also when setup correctly, and if you know where to look in the reports, you can also learn the link the visitor took to leave your site. If the link is an outgoing affiliate referral link, you can tie an organic search visitor to an affiliate sale, for example.

You can get very deep into the analysis of your web site when Google Analytics is installed, especially when leveraging the extra features like outbound clicks, paid referrals, social traffic, etc, but the important thing first is to start tracking the data. You can analyze it later on. So, from day one you should be collecting data.

This requires a JavaScript by Google that is setup for a particular web property to be placed on every page of a web site. Fortunately this is very simple to do in WordPress since it is a templated system. What that means is that you can paste the code into just one template file and it will be used on every page of the site. Better yet, you can also “inject” the code on-the-fly rather than modify any template files. Plugins, custom fucntions, and theme settings can be used to accomplish that.