My educational background is statistics, so you will be surprised if I tell you that I use several Web services to track the statistics of my blogs. Each service has its strength and purpose.
First, I use Site Meter as the statistics I open to the world. You do not need more than the free PRO service. I believe that even if you have low traffic it is a good idea to make public your Site Meter statistics. You can set your privacy level at Medium if you wish that people only set the “General Summary” report. Since I support advertising on At Home with Kim Vallee, my prospects can check the statistics on Site Meter even before they contact me. Since I wish to share more reports with them, I leave the privacy setting to normal.
Google Analytics provides the most insightful data. You do not share this info. This is for your eyes only. You will be able to learn what works and find clues on what does not work. Google Analytics allows you to drill down your data extensively.
I check the General Summary report of Site Meter daily, often a few times a day, to get a glimpse of what is happening that day. I also checked 3 Site Stats reports on Feedburner: Pages, Incoming and Outgoing. Looking at Site Meter and Feedburner takes me 30 to 60 seconds top. When if I wish to analyze my blog, I visit Google Analytics. I do that every one or two months.
If you have more than one blogs, you need to open a Site Meter for each blog. Feedburner and Google Analytics let you manage multiple blogs through a single account.
My Step-by-step Instructions
The easiest way to work is to open a tab on the browser where you log on to your Wordpress dashboard.
- click on the arrow next to Appearance and
- then, click on the Editor menu to get access to the theme files on the right column.
Open a second tab on your browser and go to Site Meter.
How to Add Site Meter to Wordpress 2.7?
After you joined Site Meter, you need to:
- Move to the tab window of your Wordpress dashboard
- Click on sidebar (sidebar.php) to edit this theme file
- Insert the Javascript code provided by Site Meter before the last </div> in the sidebar file.
- Update the file to save your changes.
What it looks like using my own Site Meter code - some info will be different for you
Then, visit Google Analytics from the tab window you used for Site Meter.
How to Add Google Analytics to Wordpress 2.7?
After you signed in to Google Analytics, you need to:
- Add a Web site profile.
- You want to add a profile for a new domain. Fill in your blog URL and time zone and click Finish
- Copy and paste the code segment provided by Google Analytics.
- Leave that tab window open, just in case
- Move to the tab window of your Wordpress dashboard
- Click on footer (footer.php) to edit that theme file
- Copy and paste the code segment into the bottom of your content, immediately before the </body> tag of the footer file
- Update the file to save your changes.
What it looks like with my own code - your tracking code will be different
It may take some time before you see your statistics but no more than 24 hours. I will talk on how to install Feedburner on Wordpress 2.7 on a future post. Feb. 2, 2009 Update: Since this becomes obsolete, I will not cover it.
January 8th, 2009 at 10:10
Actually, for Wordpress there are a lot of plugins that will allow you to set up Google Analytics like a charm:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Usually, you just have to enter your GA account # and you’re done. Advanced features are also available for advanced users.
January 21st, 2009 at 14:56
Great article. I’d like to mention that you can only add analytics to Wordpress if you host your own blog. You can’t do it if you’re hosting on Wordpress as you can’t paste in javascript – Wordpress will strip it right out.
February 16th, 2009 at 16:39
Great content. The screenshots really helped a lot! Thank you for your work on this topic!
March 29th, 2009 at 20:04
[...] collecting statistics from day one. Install both Sitemeter and Google Analytics. Both software is used for different purposes. Any serious blogger [...]
April 8th, 2009 at 14:19
Thank you so much. I’ve been trying to find a clear set of directions for a while now. Yours were the very best.
April 23rd, 2009 at 11:26
thanks for your posting about it. I will try it.