Google Analytics is a free service that provides the best Web site visitor tracking you just need to
get a free Google account and you can see the traffic on as many websites as you like in this video.
You'll set up a Google Analytics account if you don't have one already and connected to your brochure
site using a plugin allowing your clients to easily see traffic and visitor stats inside the Wordpress
dashboard is easy to do through a plugin and it keeps the tracking code separate from the theme files
allowing you to change or upgrade themes without affecting the tracking depending on the client.
You may want to encourage them to get their own Google Analytics account and then pass the credentials
on so that you can set up their WordPress dashboard.
If you don't think they need more than just the Wordpress dashboard stats or wouldn't log in to use
analytics themselves you can use your own account in this video.
I'll demonstrate how to sign up for an account of your own and connected to the wordpress site.
Now I'm already signed into a Google dot com account that I set up for this purpose and logged in already.
As you can see here at the top right if you click the Google Apps icon you can open up a few options
but then you must click them more.
And then it's not even here to get to analytics.
You need to click even more from Google and that'll give you everything that they make it down here
on the left side of your business is analytics.
You can also just type analytics dot Google dot com
when you're logged in.
If you already have an analytics account it'll take you to your dashboard page.
But since we're starting from scratch I'm going to have to use this G-mail and Google account to sign
up for a Google Analytics account great.
Now I can start in with the setup up.
All I need to do is go through the selection process here with a new account.
I'm going to track a Web site and I'm going to choose a name for it
which is the name of the Web site that I'm creating
now it is at a certain
u r l but since we're developing this site locally I don't have a live your for it yet.
I'm just going to put that in for now.
And let's go ahead and put the actual Your L in here.
Go ahead and put in my time zone.
I can basically leave all the settings at their defaults and click get a tracking ID.
I do need to accept the terms
and then Google Analytics will open up my dashboard page Great.
Now a tracking ID that starts with a UK dash is something that you can use in most plug ins to go ahead
and set up your Google Analytics tracking.
You can also track manually on any Web site or place a tracking script in the header of of a web site
so that it appears on every page just like this.
Some themes give you a place where you can put scripts like this into the header or footer of the Web
site and this is one way to manually insert Google Analytics into a WordPress site.
For us we're going to set up a plug in that while we're logged into Google we can give permission to
the plug in to get our analytics tracking code and place it properly inside the Web site.
Now that we've got Google Analytics set up lets go back to our brochure site dashboard and look at our
Google Analytics plug in that we installed in a previous video.
Click here to open up an authentication window with Google
Google Analytics Peter would like to view and manage the data control C for copy
copy that wants save and continue
create it cease fire with photography as the one property in Google.
Google Analytics Ihit save.
And then once I enable that I'll be able to see some stats on the Wordpress dashboard.
Now if there were any traffic coming into this Web site and it wasn't hosted locally but it was live
on the internet I'd be able to see a Google Analytics summary here with a lot of great stats for me
or my client.
Let's go ahead and look at a second option that we might use by hitting plug ins and new.
Just do a quick search for Google Analytics and you can see right next to Google Analytics later is
one called Google Analytics by monster insights.
More than a million active installs.
I know that this was recently acquired by a great set of developers from Yost and so let's check this
one out.
Just click Install now.
Click activate the plug in.
And now I've already got an insights menu item over here.
I'll take a look at the dashboard it is giving me a little warning message in Red please configure your
Google Analytics settings.
That's great.
And let's go ahead and click Settings.
Great.
Now since I'm already logged into Google Analytics in the background I should be able to just authenticate
with my Google account and it should pull the right code in here.
It opened a window and says that yes I'd like to allow Google Analytics to connect gives me an indication
code that I can click Control-C copy it
paste that right here into the Wordpress plug in
great.
Now I can click Save changes
and what I'll do is select the one profile for the Web site that I had set up in Google Analytics because
that's the one that I'd like to set up and track.
I think that's it.
Now if there was traffic coming to this Web site and it was live on the internet we could go to the
dashboard menu item under insights and it would start to show us some tracking graphs and reports coming
from Google Analytics.
Don't forget you don't want to have to Google Analytics plug ins set up at the same time.
And so just as I did before with Google Maps I'm going to look at my installed plug ins and go ahead
and deactivate the Google Analytics later plug in and delete that from the Web site to keep the installation
nice and clean.
There we go.
In this lesson you've logged into Google Analytics and set up a new property for the brochure site and
explored and set up two different Google Analytics plugins ins you are authenticated the plug ins with
Google and you've seen where the traffic stats and reports can be seen within WordPress in the next
chapter.
We'll revise our brochure site and change the home page from a static page to a dynamic blog style home
page which will change when new posts are published.
See you there.