The Google Analyticator plugin makes it easy to integrate Google Analytics on your WordPress website. It offers some extremely useful features, most notably a 30-day account snapshot and the ability to exclude your logged in users from your traffic data.
Why Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free and extremely popular website tracking service provided by Google. It is even more robust than many paid solutions. First, you need to sign up for Google Analytics through your Google Account. After that, just add the provided tracking code to all of the pages on your website, and your data is tracked in your Google Analytics account. If you are using a content management system like WordPress, you can add this code to the appropriate template file (usually something like footer.php) or use a plugin to do it easier and with added functionality.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of crucial data, from pageview counts and geographical locations to referring websites and the search keywords that brought visitors to your website. Advanced users can perform a variety of customizations, such as filtering out IP addresses, scheduling custom reports, tracking sales funnels, and integrating with Google AdSense and AdWords.
If you aren’t already using Google Analytics to track your website traffic, you should. To sign up for Google Analytics, please visit https://www.google.com/analytics/settings.
Why Use Google Analyticator?
There are many WordPress plugins for integrating Google Analytics into your website, but we recommend Google Analyticator above all the rest. Here’s why:
- It is easy to set up. The most basic setup consists of the following steps: install the plugin, activate the plugin, enter your Google Analytics tracking code on the plugin settings page, and click Save Changes.
- It is non-intrusive. Some other plugins clutter your dashboard with their branding, or worse, insert their branding on your website itself. Google Analyticator has a link on the plugin settings page where you can donate to the developer, but it does not brazenly beg for money like some other plugins do.
- You can exclude logged in users. This function allows you to filter out your own visits to your website, and you can also filter out other user levels. This can help to improve the accuracy of your data, especially if your own visits constitute a significant percentage of your overall site visits. Your own visits could easily be skewing data such as your top pages, pages per visit, and time on site, to name a few.
- You can track file downloads. This is useful if you have downloads such as brochures or white papers available on your site. In order to enable this, you first need to list the file extensions you want to track on the plugin settings page.
- You can view a 30-day snapshot on your dashboard. Once you authenticate your account, you can enable the dashboard widget, which appears on your admin dashboard when you log into your site. You will see a line graph of your site visits over the past 30 days, as well as some of your most important data: visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site, % new visits, top pages, top referrers, and top searches. You may be able to frequently rely on this snapshot, and you can save time by not having to log into Google Analytics as often.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress installation, you should consider using Google Analyticator. You can visit the plugin page for more information at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analyticator/. If you are an EfficientWP customer, you can go to the Plugins > Plugins menu to activate the plugin.
