I now understand that I am not yet an instinctive Wordpress user. The first instinct of an experienced WP blogger looking to install analytics of any kind (or carry out almost any task) would naturally be: “Find me a plugin!”, whereas I’m more used to handbuilding web pages using simple HTML editors.

So when I recently changed the Wordpress theme of one of my scratchpad blogs, and I knew as a result, the analytics code that I had placed in the footer file would have disappeared – changing themes is another way of losing code that has been manually added – I decided to investigate the plugin route.

It didn’t take too long to find the Google Analyticator plugin, which is intended to make installing Google Analytics as simple as possible.

Test blog software version: Wordpress 2.7

Installation and activation: worked without hitches of any kind. Following “activation”, you do have to enter the relevant ID from your Google Analytics account and enable tracking, so don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you’re done when you’ve activated the plugin. To be fair, you do get a great big warning at the top of the page letting you know about this.

Options:

a) You can choose to put the code in the footer rather than the header – I would have thought that this should be the default setting, as I’d always want to ensure that the tracking code was loaded last on the page – visits where the visitor doesn’t wait for the full page to be loaded before hitting the back button or moving on don’t seem to me to be worth counting. However, as the plugin’s author explains in the settings, apparently not all themes support having the code in the footer.

b) You can choose whether to exclude visits from logged-in blog admins. My strong recommendation would be to use this, as you don’t want your own visits to the site to be distorting your traffic. (The more traffic you have, the less important this distortion will be.) A good feature – and one that appears to be working correctly. One warning on this: the way that it works is to exclude the tracking code from the page when you are accessing the page as a logged-in admin. So, if you want to check your pages to see whether the tracking code is present and correct, you’ll need to log out first. That one confused me for a moment or two!

c) You can specify additional tracking code to go before or after the GA code. This allows you access to a range of additional tracking functions in GA. My needs here aren’t yet that sophisticated, but I can confirm that adding the text works as it should.

d) You can choose whether or not to turn on tracking of outbound links.

e) You can specify (by file suffix) any file links that you want to be counted as downloads.

Persistence:

The key question for me was as to whether this useful-seeming plugin would plug the gap that I’d originally been hoping to fill: that is, whether it would maintain the correct analytics code in the right place if I were to upgrade or switch themes. As my test blog for this has the current 2.7 version of Wordpress, I can’t test the upgrade question, but I can see what happens if I switch themes. And I can report that it handles the transition perfectly. I’ll report on how it handles any upgrades at a later stage.

Verdict:

Adding Google Analytics to your Wordpress blog is not that complicated a task, but the Google Analyticator makes it even simpler, and also gives an intelligent range of useful options. Congratulations and thanks to the plugin author, especially for taking the time to make it compatible with Wordpress 2.7.

I’ve now put the analytics code on again, in the footer. This may well be a dull system message, and of interest to no one but myself, but I wish I’d written one of those when I did whatever it was that I did that caused the code to drop off the template. My suspicion rests with an automated Wordpress update: if I were anything other than lazy I would not use automation for such things…