Following on from my last post in which I describe how to include code snippets in WordPress posts, I also decided it would also be great to track visitors to my blog using Google Analytics. Fortunately, this was very easy to set up.

The first step is to create a Google Analytics account. This is easy and fully explained by Google so I won’t go into details here. Once you have created your account you should be able to see your tracking code, which for me looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-39305296-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

// ]]></script>

To monitor your WordPress site using Google Analytics you simply need to open the editor under the ‘Appearance’ menu, select Footer (footer.php) and paste the entire tracking code block just before the closing body tag:

</body>

Once done, Google Analytics will monitor traffic to your site.

Addendum: Warning! Updating your WordPress theme will overwrite any customisations you have made to the files. So, if you run a WordPress auto-update, be prepared to have to re-paste the Google Analytics code in again.