How To Connect The Google Analyticator Plugin With Google Analytics
February 18, 2011 
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Measuring your WordPress blog’s visitors is a very important task that easily can be done with Google Analytics and the Google Analyticator plugin. Both are free to use. In this short article I’ll explain how to use both.
Starting with Google Analytics
What is Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a tool made by Google to measure the visitors of your site or blog. For a free tool, it’s unbelievable how much information you can retrieve:
- Visitors: how much (unique) visitors visit your blog, where do they come from (country / city), what are their computer specs,…
- Traffic sources: where do you visitors come from: Google, Facebook, referring websites,…
- Content: which pages on your blog or site are the most popular?
And Google is constantly making Google Analytics better and better…
How to get it
As I already wrote, Google Analytics is free to use. The only thing you need is a (free) Google account. Once you have that, you can sign up for Google Analytics.
- Visit www.google.com/analytics/
- Sign in with your Google account:
Adding a new website profile to Google Analytics
Once you’re signed in, you’ll see an overview of all the websites you are analyzing. To add a new website profile:
- Click the “Add website profile” link on the bottom of the page:
- Fill in the details for your new website profile:
- In the next screen you’ll get your tracking code:
On this page you’ll also find some javascript code to place in the header of your pages. When using the Google Analyticator plugin for WordPress, you don’t need the javascript code! - Click the “Save and finnish” button.
- The new website profile is available in the dashboard of Google Analytics:
Don’t forget that Google Analytics never shows the visitor results of the current day. So to see the results you’ll have to wait 1 day.
The statistics
To see the statistics of a website, click the “View report” link next to the title of the website profile:
The following screen will show the most important statistics:
In this overview we can see:
- How much visitors we had in the last 30 days
- Site usage (visits, pageviews, pageviews/visit, avg. time on site, % new visits)
- Map overlay (where do your visitors come from?)
- Traffic sources (how did your visitors found your website?)
- Content overview (what are the most popular pages?)
Via this overview or the menu on the left, it’s possible to analyze these statistics in detail.
Using the Google Analyticator plugin for your WordPress blog
What is Google Analyticator
If you’re coding your website yourself, then you have to manually insert the javascript code provided by Google yourself. But we are using WordPress, so there has to be a simple way, right? Right! This simple solution is called Google Analyticator! Thanks to this plugin it’s possible to connect your blog with Google Analytics.
Thanks to Google Analyticator you don’t need to paste the code provided by Google analytics yourself in the header of every page. That’s done for you (for all the pages and articles of your blog)! You only have to configure the Google Analyticator plugin, wait a day, and then you can visit Google Analytics to see the results!
How to install it
Installing the Google Analyticator plugin is very simple, you can do this just like any other plugin. If you don’t know how to install a plugin, then read my previous post “How To Install a WordPress Plugin“. Don’t forget to activate the plugin.
Configuration
After installing and activating the plugin, you have an extra item “Google Analytics” under “Settings” in the left menu. Click on this “Google Analytics” link. The screen with the Google Analyticator settings will open. Let’s take a look at the screen with the basic settings:
Till now, Google Analytics logging is Disabled and there is nog Google Analytics website profile linked with the Google Analyticator plugin.
Let’s finnish the job and connect the Google Analyticator plugin with our Google Analytics website profile:
- Next to “Authenticate with Google”, click on the “Click here to login to Google, thus authenticating Google Analyticator with your Analytics account.” link
- You’ll be transfered to Google, where you’ll see a screen with the question if you want to grant access to Google Analyticator. Click the “Grant access” button:
- After clicking the “Grant access” button, you’ll be transfered to the settings page of Google Analyticator again. The following step is to select the right account in the select box next to “Google Analytics Account:”:
- Now we are authenticated and connected with the right Google Analytics account, all there is left is to enable Google Analytics logging:
- To finnish, click the “Save changes” button on the bottom of the page!
Conclusion
Thanks to Google, it’s possible for everybody to measure the site statistics. And as you can see, it’s not that hard to connect the Google Analyticator plugin with Google Analytics!
