To add Google Analytics to your Wordpress Blog, follow these steps:

1. If you haven’t already done so… Register an account with Google. Go to Google.com or Google.co.uk and click on “sign in” at the top right hand corner of the screen. If you don’t have a Google account then click on the “Create Account Now” link.

2. Go to the Google Analytics Page: www.google.com/analytics site and click on “Access Analytics“, then enter your Google account login details.

3. Click on “Add Website Profile”

4. Enter your website URL and your Timezone and click “Finish”

5. Copy the Tracking Code Script, ie. the bit that looks like this:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((”https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(”%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(”UA-*********-25″);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

6. Goto your Wordpress Back office Administration area (www.yourdomain/WP-ADMIN) and click on:

• Design
• Theme Editor
• Footer - Paste the Google Script into the Template Footer, just above the </body> tag. Save the Template change.

7. On the Google Analytics Page, click on “FINISH“. If you click on “Check Status” link alongside your domain, it should now state “Waiting for Data -Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now.”

Congratulations You have successfully installed Google Analytics on your Wordpress blog.

See my separate post on Viewing Statistics with Google Analytics for some hints and tips on how the statistics information that I find useful from Google Analytics.

Some hints and tips for using Google Analytics

When you first login to your Google Analytics page, the default “Dashboard” view will contain data for the past month. You can change the date range for the statistics (eg. to view perhaps the past week or maybe for a specific day where you see a peak of visitors).

To change the date range for the Stats:

• Click on the Date Range at the top right hand side of the screen.
• Click on the first day for the selection on the calendar that opens up.
• Click on the last day for the selection, or omit this step for a one day only search.
• Click on “Apply”

You will now see the hits section with only your date range highlighted, all the information in the sub-sections now relate to this date range only.

The information I find most useful from Google Analytics:

Visitor Overview: Click on the “View Report” link below the Visitor Overview section. This report shows you the number of visitors to your site, whether these visitors clicked away immediately (bounced) or whether they stuck around for a while. If they did stick around the report tells you how many pages they read on average.

Traffic Sources Overview: Click on the “View Report” link below the Visitor Overview section. This is a very useful report to show you where your visitors are coming from:
eg:

• Direct hits - they typed in your address, eg from business card or flier or other advert
• Google (organic) / Yayoo (organic) - from the main pages of search engines (ie, the free hits!!). If you get these visitors look across to the Keywords section, this now shows you what keywords were used in the search engines that resulted in a visit to your website. (Use this information to build new content based on these hits).

Click back to the dashboard and take a look at where your visitors are based from the Map Overlay and see also which pages have been visited from the Content Overview.