If I am going to get people visiting this website then I should be able to count them. The whole point of this exercise is to take a volume of existing visitors to the website and
- Grow that number
- Increase the engagement with that group such that they may buy something.
The gorilla in the WordPress Visitor Tracking room of course is Google. So headed over to the Google Analytics page to get started. As user friendly as they claim the service to be I found it to be speaking in a secret club language that requires of reading and video watching to understand. Suffice to say I blundered through it crossing my fingers that I have done it correctly. I now have a Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and a Google Webmaster Account set up for Visitor tracking.
Unfortunately, aside from trial and error at the moment I have no idea how to effectively use these tools, and don’t want to waste too much time finding out. If anyone reading this can help me find a fast and simple resource for learning the Analytics basics the please leave a note in the comments.
I was then faced with the challenge of connecting the Google Analytics account to the WordPress site to allow Google to start collecting website visitor tracking data. I remembered that rather than touching the HTMP and PHP code in WordPress I needed to find a plugin. A quick search surfaced “Google Analytics”, again by Yoast.
The Plugin was well reviewed and is well documented. I’ll have to get back to that aspect of it later.