What You Need to Know About Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that gives you basic statistics about your blog’s traffic, demographic and tools that can help with SEO. All you need to get set up is a Google account.

Why do you need it? To measure your blog’s traffic of course! As your blog grows and brand collaborations start working their way into the mix, having numbers to show them is huge! So adding Google Analytics to your site from the get-go is super important. Google Analytics has sort of become the industry standard, so it’s best to use this over other tools, plus it’s consistently ranked as one of the best statistic tracking tools and is definitely one of the most popular.

To sign up go to google.com/analytics and follow the instructions to get your site set up!

Haven’t gotten it installed yet? I’m showing you how to install Google Analytics to your WordPress blog easily with these two simple sets of instructions!

1. Plugin Route (Easiest)

Go to Plugins > Add New and search for the plugin called Google Analytics. Install the plugin and drop in your tracking code that starts with UA and hit save. Your traffic will start being tracked.
* occasionally premium themes will have this built in and occasionally the theme is not compatible, so make sure to check a day or two after to make sure you’re not getting a flat line of zeros.

2. Hard-Coded (Still Very Easy)

This is how I usually install my analytics codes. More than anything this is how I first learned and still am in the habit of doing it. Plus, it’s quick and doesn’t require me to add a plugin.

Go to Appearances > Editor and scroll down until you find the header.php file and click on it. Search for the opening head tag which looks like this and drop your full tracking code here. The biggest difference here is that you won’t just drop the UA code, you’ll drop the full script from Google Analytics. Click save and you’re traffic will start being tracked.

Questions about this or any other aspects of Google Analytics? I’m happy to answer! I know the backend is daunting, so I’d love to know if this is something you want to learn more about!