Today we’re going to look at adding google analytics tracking to a blogger blog. This will allow blog owners that use blogger or blogspot to quantify the way that their visitors behave on your site.
Follow Randal in our latest video tutorial below. The video transcript is available to read underneath the video.
For example, blogger already provides data on how many page views your blog receives but it doesn’t display how many of those views are unique visitors. Adding Google Analytics will enable you to measure how many unique visitors you’ve received over a specified period of time in addition to how they arrived.
There is a far more in depth analysis that can be done with the vast amounts of visitor data that Google Analytics collects but for now we’re going to show you the first step, which is how to implement it through blogger.
Quick Guide to Adding Analytics to a Blogger Blog
Let’s start by signing in to Google Analytics. You will need to have a Google account set up in order for you to access this Google product, which you should have if you are already using blogger.
Note: you can choose to use a different Google account for analytics but for simplicity I’ll be using the same one that I have blogger set up on.
Next, click on “sign up” and you will be presented with two types of analytics tracking to choose from. Use universal tracking.
Under the heading “Setting up your account” complete the following fields:
Account Name – if you want to create a group of tracking IDs then name this with a group name e.g. if you have several brands this should be labelled with your group brand name. For now we will simply label it with the name of the blog.
Website Name – complete this field with your blog’s name.
Website URL – put the homepage url of your blog in here without the http:// (google already includes this).
Industry Category – select the category that best suits your blog. In this case I will be selecting “News”.
Reporting Time Zone – choose the country time zone that is most relevant to you. If you are reading this article in the UK then do as I have done and select “United Kingdom”.
Below the fields there is a bunch of data sharing settings that you can edit if you are not willing to share particular aspects of data that will be collected by Google on your site with Google’s HQ who say that they are using it to improve the platform, etc. Once you are happy, click on “Get Tracking ID” and click on “I Accept” after reading through the Terms of Service.
Getting Hold of Your Tracking ID
After following the previous steps you will be presented with your unique tracking ID. Highlight and copy this ID then head over to your blogger account. Navigate to the “Settings” area and click on the “Other” sub-category.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you arrive at “Google Analytics” and paste the tracking ID into the blank box next to “Analytics Web Property ID”. Then click on “Save Settings”.
And that’s it! You have now implemented Google Analytics on your blogger blog.
To view your visits, referrals, etc you must navigate to “Reporting” inside of Google Analytics. You won’t see any data immediately after adding it to your blog because not enough time has passed for Analytics to capture any visitor data. Go back to it the following day and you should begin to see some data if your blog attracts readers.
