A guide to using Google Analytics on your WordPress site
Google Analytics is a very popular (and still free!) website user stats and analytics solution. This service lets you in on a set of stats and data regarding the web traffic your site is getting, including things like: the exact number of visitors (daily, monthly, and so on), traffic sources, your most popular content, and a myriad of other statistics that can help you maximize your site’s reach identify weak points in your structure.
To enable Google Analytics you have to:
- Sign up for a Google account first.
- Enable Analytics, add your site URL in the control panel and then take the tracking ID code that Google gives you and login it in your WP site.
- By default all Gavick WordPress themes have options to add an identifier used with Google Analytics scripts (Classic). From the Left Sidebar choose GK Template Name –> Template options –> Features and then find the “Google Analytics tracking ID” field – add the “UA-…” code here.
- Now remember to save settings (button at the bottom). Once you’re done with this simple procedure, your site is fully connected to Google Analytics and the traffic stats are being collected. After few hours or days (as long as your site is getting visitors) you can check your GA account for regularly-updated statistics.
Of course, Google Analytics is without a doubt the most popular web analytics tool out there, but there are many others self-hosted replacement solutions. So if you want to add custom code of others data-collecting services not necessarily from Google, there’s no need to look for a third-party plugin to track views or unique visitors; you can just use our Gavern Framework. Under the Layout tab in the GK theme settings you’ll find two text area fields which allow you to insert code into two sections: the HEAD and the FOOTER.
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