WordPress Google Analytics Plugin

Google Analytics is one of many analytics platforms available for free. Google Analytics used to be what was called Urchin, which was acquired back in 2005; and then Google made it a free offering. GA is a very flexible and extensive free analytics platform.

It’s easy to integrate Google Analytics code into your site, but using a plugin offer some extended functionality that doesn’t come with just adding the code to your footer.

Today we’re going to look at the WordPress Google Analytics plugin by Joost, which in my opinion, does the best job — and he keeps it up to date.

First step, install the plugin. Either use the web installer or manually download it and install it. But note, there are a number of Google Analytics plugins available, make sure you find the one by Joost De Valk. Then activate it.

Here come the options.

First, make sure you insert your Google Analytics Account ID, it will look like this: UA-######-#, make sure you put the UA in the field, you need the entire string.

You can leave it like that, but if you want to, you can enable advanced options too.

Here’s a small list of things that I like doing.

• I like to un-check the “Track the administrator too” box, so it doesn’t track me while I’m viewing the site. This gives me a better perspective of the site’s actual traffic.
• I leave the prefixes are they are, they are pretty good as is.
• The only thing I really go set is Track extra Search Engines and “Track Google Image Search as a Search Engine”, even though this is only in beta, it’ll eventually work, I hope.
• I don’t tag links in RSS feeds with campaign variables because often people will want to scrap content and repost it to another site, and then they are linking to your campaign links instead of your actual URL. Yes, this does get resolved by using canonical links, but I really don’t feel it adds enough to warrant changing my RSS links.