The old saying “There is more than one way to skin a cat” definitely applies when installing Google analytics on your Wordpress website.

For example take a look at a post I wrote recently titled 34 Wordpress Plugins To Monitor Your Sites Traffic, there’s at least 30 plugins specifically for Google that will track your statistics in that list alone, and keep in mind new plugins will always be coming out in the future.

Plus there is always the old fashion method of just adding the javascript code into your themes footer.php file, but this may become a problem if you ever change your theme.

In this tutorial I want to show how you can install Google analytics on your site using the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin. I decided to use this particular plugin because it’s a light weight plugin that works seamlessly with the Google analytics product.

The first step is to Download the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin to your hard drive.

After Downloading it, Unzip the plugin file and upload it to your server using your FTP client.

The tutorial on How To Install Wordpress Plugins Using Filezilla will walk you through the process of uploading and activating Wordpress plugins.

After activating the plugin, we need to get our specific UA number for our site, If you haven’t already added your site to your Google analytics account, then read the article How To Add A New Website To Your Google Analytics Account before moving forward.

After logging into your Google analytics dashboard, you should see your websites domain name and next to it a UA number, Highlight and Copy the UA number.

The next step is to set up the Ultimate GA plugin.

Under the settings tab on the left sidebar of your Wordpress admin, you should see a link with the text Ultimate GA. Click on it to Continue.

If you can’t see this link check to make sure you have activated the plugin.

After opening the Ultimate GA settings screen, you will notice there is a text box, Account ID with this text inside of it UA-XXXXXX-X

Replace this with the UA number you previously copied from your Google account.

1. Paste in the UA number you previously copied from your Google account.
2. Click on the Update options button.

After completing the steps above, go back into your Google analytics dashboard to finish off the installation.

In the dashboard, on the right hand side you will see on the same line of your new domain name, a link that says Edit. Click on the link to continue.

A new window will open and you should see a link on the top right hand corner of your page with the text Check Status. Click on the link to continue.

Google will do a quick scan of your website looking for the UA number you have just installed, and if all goes well you should see a confirmation message and some text saying it’s Waiting for Data.

It usually takes about twenty four hours to start seeing any results, Google does not display real time data, so come back tommorrow and check out how well your site is performing.

More On This Topic...

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• 34 Wordpress Plugins To Monitor Your Sites Traffic.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.

The first thing you need to do is log into your Google account.

Once you have logged in,

look for the Analytics link on your Google account page. Click on the link to continue.

You will then be taken into your Google Analytics dashboard.

Once inside of your Analytics Dashboard look for the link that says Add Website Profile. Click on it to continue.

The next screen to open is where you need to input the URL of the website you are wanting to add.

The three steps you need to take when adding a new domain on this screen are…

1. Make sure the option for Add a Profile for a new domain is checked.
2. Enter in your URL and make sure you have the correct protocol for your domain.
3. Click Finish

After you have completed the steps above you are then presented with your tracking code. This is the code you are required to insert into your website.

1. Your Account ID number.
2. Your Java script code.
3. Click Finish.

And that’s all there is to adding a new domain to your existing Google Analytics account.

The next step is To Install Google Analytics In Wordpress.

More On This Topic...

• How To Sign Up For A Google Analytics Account.
• How To Do Basic Competition Research In Google
• Googles Free Keyword Research Tool
• How To Add Your Blog To Your Feedburner Account.

To access the Google Analytics home page type into your web browsers address bar the following URL, “www.google.com/analytics/” and hit the enter key on your keyboard.

When you arrive at the Analytics home page, you will see a link on the right hand side of the page with the text Sign Up Now. Click on the link to continue.

In the next screen you will see a sign up box similar to the one you use when you log into your Gmail account, Simply enter in the same Gmail user-name and password you use with your Gmail account.

After you have successfully logged in, you will see in the bottom left hand corner of the screen a small Sign Up button, Click here to proceed.

Next, you will then be asked to put in your websites URL, location and time zone details, Click Continue when finished.

After proceeding to the next screen you will need to put in you personal details Last name, First name etc.. Click the Continue button when finished.

The next step is to read the user agreement, if you agree to the terms Click in the check box next to the Yes, I agree then Click on the Create New Account button.

The next screen will be where you can get your Analytics code, this is the code you need to insert into your blog or website.

If you are not ready to install this code yet, Don’t worry we can always come back and get this code later, the main point of this tutorial is to get you set up with an Analytics account, Click on the Finish button, and that’s it, we’re done.

So basically, that’s all there is to adding the Analytics service to your Google account.

If you now go to your Google Account home page you will see a link added for your Google Analytics, This link will take you straight to your Google Analytics admin area.

More On This Topic...

• How To Log Into Feedburner.
• How To Add A New Website To Your Google Analytics Account.
• How To Set Up A New Google Account.
• How To Do Basic Competition Research In Google

Keeping an eye on the my statistics helps me to stay focused on my blog and can also give me a wonderful insight into the direction I could take for producing new content for my readers.

Below is a list of Plugins I have found that will help to keep track of the data and statistics of your site, Most of these plugins are for Wordpress 2.7 and up, and require a Google analytics account, others work by using the Wordpress API, while others rely on tracking from various sources from around the web.

I’m sure you will find a plugin on this list that will meet your needs, So all you have to do now is decide on the best statistics and tracking plugin for your site and enjoy.

My disclaimer; Install these plugins at your own risk and make sure you have a regular backed up copy of your database handy when installing any new plugin to your site.

Wp-stattraq

The Wp-stattraq plugin by tmcookies and strings28 will allow you to keep track of every hit on your public Wordpress site, it does not track admin activity.

The following views are available:

• Summary View – an overview of blog activity
• Hit Counter – a drill-down report of hits for various periods of time
• User Counter – Track the number of individual computers who came to the site
• Page Views – track the number of total views your WordPress installation served
• Browser – Find out what browsers visited your site
• Referrer – What other sites brought traffic to your own site
• Search Terms – What search terms did search engined link to your site
• SE Saturation – what percent of pages on your site have been crawled by the GoogleBot or the BingBot
• IP addresses – What individual IP addresses requested data from your site

Woopra Analytics Plugin

To use the Woopra Analytics Plugin by eliekhoury, markjaquith and ShaneF, you need an active account on Woopra.com. Woopra is a comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application.

The Plugin Features include:

• Live Tracking and Web Statistics
• A rich user interface and client monitoring application
• Real-time Analytics
• Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites
• Deep analytic and search capabilities
• Click-to-chat
• Visitor and member tagging
• Real-time notifications
• Easy Installation and Update Notification

StatPressCN

This plugin can show you real time statistics about your blog, tracks your friend’s visit, collects information about your sites visitors, spiders, keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Google Integration Toolkit

The Google Integration Toolkit plugin by Daniel Frużyński, allows you to easily integrate Google services with your blog, you can check how your site is indexed in Google (using Google Webmaster Tools), get detailed statistics (Google Analytics), earn money (Google AdSense) and more.

This version of Google Integration Toolkit plugin provides following features:

• Integration with Google Webmasters Tools (both verification methods are supported: meta tag and verification file);
• Integration with Google Analytics (with optional Google Analytics – Google AdSense integration);
• RSS/Atom Feeds tagging – you can track visitors coming from your feed using Google Analytics;
• 404 error tracking using Google Analytics;
• AdSense Section Targeting – improve AdSense ads targeting;

It also includes the following translations

• English
• Polish
• Russian

WP-Stats-Dashboard

The WP-Stats-Dashboard plugin by Dave Ligthart displays the WordPress.com stats graph directly in your Dashboard.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Display the WordPress.com statistics graph in your dashboard.
• Choose the type of stats graph you want to display.
• Automatic Login.
• Stats Dashboard Widgets (graph, overview, clicks, referrers, post views and search terms).
• Google pagerank, Google social graph, Google backlinks, alexa rank, technorati rank, del.icio.us saves, compete rank, moz rank and yahoo rank in overview.
• WordPress MU, safe_mode compatible.

Analytics360

MailChimp’s Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your Wordpress dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Site Traffic: Visualize your site’s traffic trends and see how blog posts and email campaigns affect overall traffic. You can also isolate traffic coming directly to your site from email campaigns with the “campaign traffic” tab.
• List Growth: Chart the growth of your mailing list over time. Compare new and existing subscribers. And if you’ve got multiple lists, see how they stack up to each other.
• Top Referrers: Curious how all that new traffic ended up on your site? Wondering if more people are finding you through search or direct referrals? This plugin Will break it all down for you with Google Analytics.

StatPress

The StatPress plugin by Daniele Lippi was the first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect statistics information.
• Using StatPress you could spy your visitors while they are surfing your blog and check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
• In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).
• StatPress also includes a widget one can possibly add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).

It also includes the following translations.

• English,
• Italian,
• Spanish,
• French,
• German,
• Russian,
• Norwegian,
• Dutch,
• Brazilian,
• Turkish,
• Swedish,
• Danish,
• Persian,

Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker

The Subscriber Inbound Traffic Tracker by Brian Cray will Automatically tag RSS permalinks with UTM campaign tags so you can directly attribute traffic from your subscribers.

Your subscriber traffic will automatically be segmented in your Google Analytics

Google Analytics for WordPress

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Joost de Valk automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, track image search queries and it will even work together with Urchin.

In the options panel for the plugin, you can determine the prefixes to use for the different kinds of outbound links and downloads it tracks.

The Google Analyticator

The Google Analyticator by cavemonkey50, jesse_altman and spiralwebconsulting adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Supports standard Google Analytics tracking
• Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
• Includes a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• Supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Supports download link tracking
• Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
• Allows hiding of Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Installs easily – unlike other plugins, the user doesn’t even have to know their Analytics UID
• Allows tracking code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
• Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice

Piwik Analytics

The Piwik Analytics Plugin by Jules Stuifbergen is a basic wordpress plugin for the Piwik web Analytics tool. It adds the piwik javascript code into every page of your weblog. It is based quite heavily on the Google Analytics wordpress plugin by Joost de Valk.

The following options are supported:

• piwik hostname
• piwik path
• site ID
• option to control download tracking
• option to exclude the admin user (probably you)

This plugin requires a running Piwik installation somewhere under your control. It does not include Piwik itself.

Graphical Statistics Report

The Graphical Statistics Report plugin by Gopi.R will display a graphical report for the sites admin about the Monthly user registration count, Monthly post count graphical report, Monthly comments posted count and Category wise post count graphical report.

Spider Tracker

The Spider Tracker plugin by Tony Fernandes will track web spiders’ activity on your WordPress blog. It features a friendly user interface allowing you to define which spiders to track and how many recent index crawls to store for each.

The main statistics page will list all your active spiders showing real time stats for each including the last x pages visited by the spider (x is defined by you!), it also reports how many pages each spider has crawled since you set up that spider or since you last reset that spider’s stats, information about the spider such as a link to its homepage, its function, characteristics and more.

mySTAT

The mySTAT plugin by KILLER provides you with more than 50 reports. The plugin is easy to install and to set up, it counts all of the visitors of your web-site – both humans and robots. All data is stored at your server.

WP-ShortStat

The WP-ShortStat plugin by chuyskywalker, happyarts is a lite statistics plugin for WordPress.

Statpress SEOlution

The Statpress SEOlution plugin by Christoph Grabo is a fork of the Statpress Reloaded plugin with some additional improvements.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• flash charts for statistics
• detailed stats for some search engine robots (spiders) like Google, Yahoo and MSN
• general spider stats
• tabbed sections in some views to avoid long scrolling
• some charts with (moving and weighted) average lines
• and all features you know from Statpress Reloaded.

WordPress.com Stats

The WordPress.com Stats plugin by skeltoac and mdawaffe collects information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page

Installing this stats plugin is much like installing Akismet, all you need is to put in your API Key and the rest is automatic.

All of the processing and collection runs on the Wordpress servers not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account, and it’s one of the fastest stats systems, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

WP-Piwik

The WP-Piwik plugin by André Bräkling adds a Piwik stats site to your WordPress dashboard. It’s also able to add the Piwik tracking code to your blog using wp_footer.

You need a running Piwik installation to view your stats.

It also includes the following translations.

• English.
• German.

Social Traffic Monitor

The Social Traffic Monitor plugin by Christopher Finke monitors your blog traffic for activity coming from social news or bookmarking sites.

When someone clicks on a link to your blog on one of the major social news or bookmarking sites (currently Digg, Netscape, Reddit, Newsvine, Fark, Slashdot, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon), the plugin begins to log the visits to that page. This data can then be displayed in the form of a graph of visitors per hour.

WP-phpMyVisites

The WP-phpMyVisites plugin by Frank Bültge gives a lot of information on websites visitors, visited pages, software/hardware utilization, etc… The GUI Interface is fun and practical. The installation is entirely automated and very simple.

phpMyVisites is a free and powerful open source (GNU/GPL) software for websites statistics and audience measurements.

The web analytics software is translated into more than 30 languages!

WP-Stats

The WP-Stats plugin by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan Displays your WordPress blog statistics. Ranging from general to total statistics.

StatPress Reloaded

The StatPress Reloaded plugin by Manuel Grabowski shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect information.
• You can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.
• In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress Reloaded page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed).
• StatPress Reloaded also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).
• StatPress can automatically delete older records to allow the insertion of newer records when your space is limited.

It also includes the following tranlations.

• English,
• Italian,
• Spanish,
• French,
• German,
• Russian,
• Norwegian,
• Dutch,
• Brazilian,
• Turkish,
• Swedish,

iRedlof Google Analytics Stats

The iRedlof Google Analytics Stats plugin by Rohit LalChandani is a wordpess admin panel plugin, that will allow you to manage everything from one place. This plugin is like wordpress .com stats plugin but the difference between the two is that wordpress.com stats works with wordpress analytics stats system and iRedlof GA Stats works with google analytics stats system.

Using this plugin, you get your GA stats straight from your account on google to your wordpress admin panel.

Right now this plugin is in development phase and only has limited features i.e. visits/day, pageviews/day,

To use this plugin you need google analytics account.

Blog Stats by W3Counter

The Blog Stats by W3Counter plugin Integrates W3Counter’s free web stats service into your WordPress blog. This plugin adds a Blog Stats Dashboard to your admin area with real-time usage statistics for your blog.

These statistics include…

• the number of visitors and page views you’ve received over the past 7 days and all time,
• top viewed posts,
• top referrers,
• top searches
• and top visitor locations.
• It also adds a sidebar widget for integrating W3Counter’s tracking code into your theme.

Requires a free web stats account from W3Counter.com.

Search Meter

The Search Meter plugin by Bennett McElwee automatically records what people are searching for, and whether they are finding what they are looking for on your blog.

It keeps track of what people have been searching for in the last couple of days, week or month. It also shows you which searches have been unsuccessful. With Search Meter, you’ll be able to find out what people are searching for, and give them what they want by creating new posts on those topics.

The Popular Searches widget displays a configurable list of recent popular successful search terms on your blog, with each term hyperlinked to the actual search results. There’s also a Recent Searches widget, which simply displays the most recent searches.

Search Meter installs easily and requires no configuration. Just install it, activate it, and it starts tracking your visitors’ searches.

Wp-visitors

The Wp-visitors plugin by Gowtham records information about every visitor (page load). Requested URL, Referring URL, IP address, Hostname and Browser along with Date/Time and displayed in a tabular fashion. Geographical resolution of IP address (it’s only approximate) is also included.

Feed Statistics

The Feed Statistics Plugin by Christopher Finke tracks statistics for your RSS/Atom feeds, including the number of subscribers, which feed readers they’re using, which posts they’re viewing and which links they’re clicking on.

The plugin adds a “Feed” section to your Wordpress administration panel. This section has four subsections: Feed (Options), Feed Readers, Post Views, and Clickthroughs.

AddFreeStats Plugin

The AddFreeStats Plugin by AddFreeStats will track how many people visit your WordPress blog, when they came, how they found your blog and much, much more… All AddFreeStats blog statistics reports are in real-time!

AddFreeStats.com also tracks Exit links and Google Adsense tracking clicks and where your visitors go after they leave your blog.

With AddfreeStats you can also check your blog stats on your mobile.

Welcome To Your Data

The Welcome To Your Data plugin by Adam Wulf  makes it easy to track all of your statistics data from Google Analytics, Google Reader, Feedburner, and WP SlimStats in 1 easy to use plugin.

View all of your statistics inside your WordPress admin panel. Find correlations between data in Google Analytics, Fedburner, SlimStats, and Google Reader.

GeneralStats

The GeneralStats plugin by Bernhard Riedl Counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages.

Wordpress Google Analytics Reports

The Wordpress Google Analytics Reports plugin by Imthiaz Rafiq brings the Google Analytics reports to your blog dashboard. Currently this plugin supports timeline and map overlay charts. The plugin is designed to help the blogger to see their blog traffic without logging into Analytics.

Track MyBlogLog

The Track MyBlogLog by Improving The Web  identifies and tracks MyBlogLog readers on your website. The plugin will store the user avatar, location, website, twitter, technorati, etc.. along with the last visit dates.

Additionally, this plugin also has the ability to show a personalized message to the reader. This message can include the name of the user, the website, etc.

Count per Day

The Count per Day plugin by Tom Braider counts reads and visitors of your site.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• shows reads per page
• shows visitors today, yesterday, last week, last months and other statistics on dashboard
• you can show these statistics on frontend (e.g. on sidebar) too
• It counts 1 visit per IP per day. So any reload of the page don’t increment the counter.

It also includes the following translations.

• English,
• German,
• Italian,
• Portuguese,
• Belorussian

CyStats

The CyStats plugin by Michael Weingaertner is a feature-rich statistics plugin that is integrated in the WordPress admin area.

Notable features of this plugin are…

• Bounce rate, ignore-by-cookie, ignore-by-ip/post-id/user_agent lists
• Hits, visits for day/week/month/year – human or robots
• Top refering pages
• Most read categories and tags
• Most read, most commented posts
• Most read feeds, number of feed visits today
• Internal/external search words
• Operating systems
• Daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
• 404 error requests
• Browsers/clients/tools/…, w/o. version numbers
• Template tags for most read posts, user count,…
• Optional IP-anonymizing
• Multi language support (currently english, german supported).
• Optional tracking of admin area visits

I’m sure you found something in the list that will help you to keep track of your sites performance, and If you didn’t get time to check out all of these plugins, why don’t you bookmark this post and come back to it later.

More On This Topic...

• How To Install Google Analytics In Wordpress.
• How To Download A Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The DD Sitemap Plugin For Wordpress.
• Installing The Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

It is now a free service provided by Google.com for website owners to track and measure traffic to and on their websites.

The data measured in the analytics includes…

• How visitors found your site. (traffic Sources)
• The keywords people searched for to find your site in the search engines.
• The location of your visitors. (Country, City and Town)
• The time spent on your site.
• The number of visitors to your site over a day week or monthly period.
• How many pageviews your site has received.
• The average time a visitor spends on your site.
• The percentage of new visits.
• The bounce rate of your site.

Plus a continuous stream of new features that are constantly being added to the Google analytics service.

The information collected by Google analytics can really help you to see and understand what is happening on your site, what pages are more popular than others and what people are looking for when they found your site.

This information is invaluable and can give you an insight as to the type of content you could be adding to your site.

To start using analytics you need to set up an account with Google, my preference for setting up an account is to open a free Gmail account then simply add any additional services (Analytics for example) to that particular Google Gmail account.

But before you can start collecting data with your analytics, you need to add your websites URL to your Google account, Google will then give you some Java Script code to place into your site, it is this code that allows Google to see what is happening on your site.

Google will then track any visitor information and display that information within your Google analytics dashboard.

I have found the data from Google can have a time lag as much as a 24 hour delay, I don’t expect any immediate data to show up before this time has lapsed.

For More Information About Google Analytics Visit The Official Google Analytics Help Page.

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• What Is Feedburner?
• What Is Gmail?
• What Is A Tag?
• What Is Keyword Research?