When: April 7th, 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Where: Chattanooga Public Library (4th Floor Downtown)
What: Setting up Google Analytics within WordPress – Jim Lockwood, and Kevin Stover
Meetup Notes April 7th, 2015
- We will discuss how to install the product, what it does, and analyze how to use it.
- What is google Analytics?
- Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
- What do you need to use Google Analytics
- A website
- A gmail account
- Access to edit your site
- ie.FTP
- How to create an account
- Make sure to have a gmail account and a website first.
- go to http://www.google.com/analytics
- click the create an account link
- Analytics Hierarchy
- Account
- This is the overview of multiple websites this is every site under your account
- Once a property is in your account you can’t give it away
- Setting up your account is REALLY important.
- Account is different from your email account.
- Property
- These are websites that you have ownership of.
- Views
- Views are how you will see the data that google collects.
- These are basically reports.
- Views do not collect data retroactively. The view must be active to be collecting data.
- Account
- The Code
- Next to each property there is a code, this code links to your account and allows google to link info back to your website.
- Add the code to every page of your site.
- Question “is there a difference in putting in the header or footer”
- Answer “It is better to put it in the header because it will load first and there are other items that Analytics can look for that will need to load when your page loads.
- Question “is there a difference in putting in the header or footer”
- Plugins
- Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
- The plugins automagically pulls and populates the code for you.
- Protip: Don’t look at your Analytics every single day. Check it Weekly or monthly.
- Setting up google analytics manually
- Edit header.php file
- Some themes(e.g. Genesis) provide place to insert header/footer code
- Paste code directly after the <body> tag
- Your theme may not have a header.php if it doesn’t try to find what the header.php is in your theme.
- Add to function.php
- Don’t attempt unless comfortable with PHP.
- Data Views
- Start with three basis views
- Raw Data View – no filters
- Test View – Filtered, used for testing changes
- Master View – Filter, Used for analysis
- Also Recommended
- Mobile – Filtered, including only visits on mobile Devices(phones,tablets, ect.)
- Most important Get it on your website, get your Raw data view and your Master View set up.
- Start with three basis views
- Filters
- Filters Remove or change data in your data set.
- Warning!!!!! filters are destructive. Filtering will permanently change data in that view. This is why you should maintain one unfiltered view.
- You can not filter retroactively.
- Leave your raw data alone.
- Typical filters:
- Internal Traffic
- Bots & Spiders
- Enforce Lowercase
- Filters Remove or change data in your data set.
- Why are you doing all this?
- The we want set goals for our analytics.
- To make the site better for users.
- To see how accessible is your site.
- Other Recommendations
- Setup your Google Webmaster account at the same time
- Http://www.google.com/webmaster/tools/
- Learn more at google analytics Academy
Speaker :Kevin Stover
- What’s coming in WordPress 4.2
- This will be the first major release in 2015
- Features
- Press This – admin -> tools allows user to drag and drop the link to your bookmarks bar.
- Emoji support- you can now use your favorite emoji
- Plugin updates are changing – when you click the update button you will no longer take you change pages; however, if you do bulk updates you will change pages.
- Browse themes in the customizer. This will allow the user to change the theme on the fly.
- Screen reader text class- This will allow dynamically added content to be read by the screen reader technology.
- Planned releases 4.2 april 2015, 4.3 August 2015, 4.4 December 2015
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