Google analytics tracking code for blog?

bamme

Senior Member
Hi, im pretty new to SEO and have just signed up for Google Analytics.

Id like to add a blog to my analytics account but am confused when it asks me to input my tracking code - i would ideally want this on every page, including every post page..

i have included this in my wordpress theme's 'footer.php' file:

<div id="footer">
Copyright © <strong><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></strong>
</div>

<?php
wp_footer();
echo get_theme_option("footer") . "\n";
?>
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
_uacct = "UA-9738836-2";
urchinTracker();
} catch(err) {}</script>
</body>
</html>

will this work to include the tracking code on each and every page?

thanks!
emma
 
This is meant to go in every page if i remember correctly? Isnt there just a plugin tha you can install in wordpress for this to operate?
 
thought it might, that will be posted on all pages that are live then right?

PS: Jaza where is your favourite food avatar?...join in the party!
 
Well every page that uses the footer.php file yeah.
My pic is my fav food, I mean I'm just that gorgeous you just want to eat me. :D
 
Thanks jaz and glen for clarifying that :)

Can i ask if either of you guys use anything specific on google analytics to help you know how your site is progressing in terms of hits and effective-ness (is that a word?) of SEO?

It seems a huge lotta info to me..

Emma
 
can i ask how you can track a hosting/domain reseller website/program
It doesn't really work for as i have to forward it to a domain name, i don't host it and don't have access to it also.I got the actual link masked.........................honestly can you reall do SEO for something like that?
 
Hi Emma

Using Google webmaster tools is a useful tool for seeing the keywords/search terms that your site appears in, you can get an idea of what people are searching for also I'd recommend downloading the SEO extension for firefox from these guys to measure your successes and failures.
 
@h_freezy

You can do SEO for it but you'd be doing it without any feedback on the tracking from Google, but nevertheless you can still apply SEO techniques to the site if you can update the content. Look at the SEO Book link above which can give you results on where your page appears in Googles rankings and you can work from these results
 
@Emma
For my personal sites I use my own personalized site tracking that I created myself and look more are conversion rates than SEO terms that brought me the traffic TBH. High conversion rates are what you want to focus more on not how the traffic got there.

For example, as I know someone will give me grief for that.
The average site only converts 3.5% of traffic to it, so driving more traffic to your site isn't going to do you any favors 9 times out of 10, as the same small rate will only qualify for sales, clicking ad links etc....

Now if i don't bring in any more traffic but manage to get the average rate of 3.5% up to 60% I make a tremendous amount of money in comparison rather than wasting time on tripling my site traffic.

If I then can accomplish that, which is a lot harder and is one of the reasons why information architects get paid far more money than SEO's, and then drive more terms then well......see where I'm coming from?
SEO tracking should be 1 of the last things you focus on IMO, getting the site working, and I don't just mean looking good x-browser should be the main thing.

Think of your site like a shop on the highstreet. Search engines are the advertising you use to get ppl through the door.

Now if you spend £500 a month (In on-line sense time) on advertising and more ppl walk through your doors great, but if only 3% of them buy from you so what?

If you then spend £500 a month (again time not money on-line) on improving your shops interior, aisle widths, items in the right place with the right colours to draw the right attention etc.... which do you think is the better approach? Same on-line.

But for SEO tracking I tend to know what my main terms are even for local clients so I manually check every month or so on there progress. If the pages go up I know they are doing well I don't personally relie on external tools to do my work for me I like to clarify everything myself.

But the thing most ppl do when they realize that they can change their positions in the search engines is get hung up on SEO when they should be spending that time plus more making sure their persuasion architecture, information scent and about 100 other terms are correct first.

It's like building a boat, lobbing it in a lake and then spending the time using a bucket to empty the water gushing in rather than enjoying the ride.

@h_freezy
Howz the link masked?
Take it you can't access the copy?
If not, why not exactly? :)

Jaz
 
Something like mint ($30 per site) might be of more use if you want to get a full breakdown of your site visits etc.

Now I haven't personally tried it (yet) but iirc Onartis was going to and the online demo seems pretty comprehensive.

What do you reckon Jaz :)
 
Well I haven't tried it but from thier feature list, 3 of them you should get for free from your hosting provider TBH.

The pages and the real estate options look good but still doesn't tell you your conversion rate, which IMO opinion is the main metric you should use to determin how well your site is doing. Mine gives me nice arrows in green if it's going up red if it's going down but I created mine myself and TBH I can't see how a general 1 could work that out for you. So......

Conversion rate ~
Visitors/Sales ratio

Thats hard to work out on a page by page basis, on a site basis not so hard if you know how many visitors and how many links where clicked, or items sold.
 
I agree that a decent host should cover atleast a few of the areas covered in mint but sometimes they're a bit difficult to get to and having it all in one place is awfully convenient (especially if you have an iphone/ipod touch :))

Obviously yours is more specialised and orientated to your needs etc but you got to remember most of us are bottom of the class in this area :p

Mint's actually got some plugins for things like 'duration' and 'attention span' which cover time spent on site and bounce rates (left after one page) which could help in the area's you're on about (assuming I'm understanding the gist of things) as they show how long people stay on the site.

Now I'm not saying it's perfect but for $30 (what's that £16/17 at present) I'm likely to have a play with it as I think with the right combination of plugins it could be fairly useful :)
 
Yeah the bounce rate, the durations, that depends on how it is done though TBH, plugins and also the errors plugin do look good and I suppose for £15 it's not bad.

Creating your own though is not that hard, you just need to think about it in depth first and implamenting it is pretty easy if you can interact with a DB.
 
it might be easy for you but for someone like me who is not up to speed on those sorts of things this sort of option is pretty handy :)

I can muddle my way through html, a bit of js and basic php if needed but getting anything deeper than that and I'm out of my depth at the moment (still learning though) :)
 
@mike: thanks, i found 'em a few days ago, im exploring the toolbar now! :) So, really - what google webmaster tools does is also done with this external tool? (you can use that whole keyword xray thing..)? What about if you wanted to find out for example what page had been hit most in say the past month? Or where people had been on your site, etc? Is this webmaster tools..?

@jazajay: Those are very good points, and I'm glad you said that - I was questionning myself for naturally thinking along those lines (shouldnt you worry more about if your site is selling so to speak rather than if its getting a billion hits and people are leaving before your 'squeeze page'.. ) but these guys' blog is completely new - alongside several other small sites. The blog hasnt really come 'into its own' yet with only 2 posts, and im sort of trying to make plans for it that cover all areas - for example if i didnt know what i do from my mistakes, and research into seo, i may have said oooh get a flash website..or even get a static html site that i update once a month for you or something.

stripped down the whole thing has a record label behind it it, trying to sell mp3s and get people to put their email address in for their newsletter really.


as a volunteer i also need to show these guys whats going on with their pages and if im making a difference to the 'interest' they/their artists receive now theyre online, so i suppose seo stuff is important in the sense its a visual thing, and in some ways more for them than me - thats why, at the moment, im trying to figure if google webmaster tools can show me whats affecting hits per page, how effective my keywords are and stuff, and whether it can show me what pages/sites are most popular - so i can report back as well as have an idea if im wasting my time with keywords im currently trying to go with, etc, and essentially write a good article thats also got some good keywords in it heh.

From your reply I now know i should definitely know a bit more about structure of info and how to present it.. do you know (given what the record label wants to sell/get interest in) of a resource that i can get a rough idea how i could improve on/how i could find out what to focus on in terms of information architecture?
 
I completely forgot about this until I read the above. Theres a plugin for the firebug addon for firefox called senSEO that can give you ratings for individual keywords (that you pick) along with a few other features.
 
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