Your Wordpress Blog and Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a service provided by Google to help you track the traffic that your wordpress blog is drawing. All Bloggers want to know how many daily visitors they get to their blog. It’s a lonely feeling to be blogging away and have no idea if anyone is reading what you are writing or not.

Google Analytics is a free tool that is easy to use and install. Once you have signed up with Google and opened your account, Google Analytics provides you with a piece of code which you need to add to every page on your site. You can even use the one account to track multiple domain names.

How do I add Google Analytics to my Wordpress Blog?

Adding the Google Analytics code to a wordpress blog this is a simple thing to do. All you need to do is paste the HTML code that is provided to you by Google Analytics into the footer section of your Wordpress blog and you can track the traffic statistics for every page and post on your blog. This section is found in the style sheets within your wordpress theme. The wordpress theme is found in the appearance section of your wordpress admin dashboard.

Be sure to add a filter so that you don’t include your own visits to your wordpress blog in your statistics. If you don’t include a filter then your traffic statistics will be artificially elevated. This isn’t of any consequence if you have thousands of visitors to your blog everyday. But it has a high impact if your blog is relatively new and you haven’t built up a loyal following as yet.

To add a filter to your Google Analytics account you need to login to your account and from the dashboard you can add a filter by clicking on the “filter manager” link.

Types of Google Analytic Filters

There are several ways that you can add a filter to your wordpress blog and thus filter the information coming into your Google Analytics account.

Filters can be set up to:

Exclude all traffic from a particular domain – you can use this filter to exclude all traffic from a particular domain (it could be your ISP or a company network etc)

Exclude all traffic from an IP address – this filter is probably the most useful one for bloggers. You can exclude traffic from a single IP address or multiple IP addresses. If you don’t know what your IP address is then simply type “what is my IP address?” into the Google search box and you will be taken to a site that gives you that information.

Include only traffic to a subdirectory – this may be useful if your wordpress blog is located on a subdirectory of your main domain name


The above 3 filters are the predetermined filters that Google Analytics gives you but there is also a Custom Filter option within the Filter Manager and you are able to set up many different filters according to your specific requirements. For more details about these options visit the help section within Google Analytics.