As bloggers, tracking your traffic and being able to tell where people are finding you is extremely important in growing our audience. It’s also cool to find ways that people are coming to your site that you weren’t aware of!
Google Analytics does this incredibly well, and if you haven’t installed GA yet, I recommend you stop what you’re doing (okay, after you finish this post!) and get to work! Here’s How to Install Google Analytics:
First you’ll need a Google Analytics account. Go to http://google.com/analytics — if you have a gmail account, just use that to sign in to make it easy. If you don’t use Gmail, don’t worry, you can still use Google Analytics, just create an account when prompted.
Set up your account by answering the simple questions and you’re almost set! Now you need to install it, which can be a little trickier if you’re not familiar with coding.
Step one: Grab your Tracking Code! You can find that in your Google Analytics Dashboard here:
Copy that code:
Then drop it into your file! This example is for WordPress. You want to go to ‘Appearances’ > ‘Editor’ > then click on the header.php file to open it. Drop the code right after the opening <head> tag and hit save.
That’s it! It typically takes a day for it to start collecting data, so don’t get discouraged on day one!
By Blair of The Fox and She