The Google Analytics (GA) plugin lets you easily add Google’s web tracking script to your WordPress site.
Google Analytics is a truly amazing service for marketers: it generates comprehensive site statistics for your site — at no cost — that are entirely geared towards website optimization (quick tour). The only downside is that Google ends up knowing your stats. If you do not wish it to, look into the Hitslink plugin.
To make use of the plugin, browse Settings / Google Analytics and paste the code that GA provided you with for your site, and you’re pretty much done.
Note that site authors are not tracked so as to not pollute your stats.
This plugin contrasts with a number of similar WordPress plugins, in the amount of effort that was put into making it easy to use, and into integrating other plugins so you can make the best of your stats.
AdSense integration
AdSense integration is built-in. As soon as you tie your GA account to your AdSense account, GA will start tracking revenues and clicks, on a per keyword and on a per page basis.
To take full advantage of this, filter your GA reports using custom, Advanced Segments. Oftentimes, these will allow you to discover stunning — not to mention unintuitive — things about your site and its visitors.
Ad Manager integration
The Ad Manager plugin makes GA track any click on its ad widgets as GA events, provided the click doesn’t occur in an iframe tag. (Their provider’s AUP generally disallows to change their code.)
Contact Form integration
The Contact Form plugin makes GA track contact form usage as GA events.
Mediacaster integration
The Mediacaster plugin makes GA track file downloads and media player usage (play, stop, completed video or podcast, and so on) as GA events.
Newsletter Manager integration
The Newsletter Manager plugin makes GA track subscription form usage as GA events. It will additionally segment users who subscribe to your mailing lists, allow you to track what they do once subscribed in a convenient report.
404 error and outbound link tracking
Page not found errors on your site are tracked as /404/?page=…&from=…
Clicks on outbound links are tracked as /outbound/?to=…
Search tracking
Search tracking is built into Google Analytics: edit your site’s profile in GA, and add the “s” parameter as a search query parameter.
Domain-wide tracking
This feature is still experimental, but nonetheless worth a note if you wish to track your domain and all of its subdomains in a single report. Simply add a define in your wp-config.php file as follows:
define('GA_DOMAIN', '.example.com');At the time of writing, doing so will turn off media player usage tracking, hence the “experimental.” Everything else works fine.
To make the best of the resulting reports, customize the way your reports are displayed by creating an advanced filter for that domain’s profile:
Filter Type: Custom filter / Advanced Field A: Hostname Extract A: (.*) Field B: Request URI Extract B: (.*) Output To: Request URI Constructor: $A1$B1
You’ll then be able to your various subdomains directly.
Custom event tracking
The GA lastly allows to track custom-defined events, in case the need arises. Doing so is relatively easy, too: simply add a ga_event class to your <a>, <div> or <form> tag of interest.
Download
This package is part of Semiologic Pro, and is access-restricted.
Bleeding Edge Zip
Frequently Asked Questions
The Semiologic forum is the best place to report issues.