How to add Google Analytics to WordPress.com blog

NOTE: This post applies only to those sites hosted on WordPress.com.

What is Google Analytics?

According to Wikipedia, Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports traffic to your website. Also, it lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.

Prerequisites

You must have a custom domain for your WordPress.com site.

Method 1 –

In this method, you can add Google Analytics to your site by upgrading to the Business plan offered by WordPress.com. Upgrading to a Business plan allows you to integrate Google Analytics with your site which provides you with a deeper understanding of your website visitors and customers.

Upgrading to a Business plan costs $24.92 per month, which is billed yearly. Instructions on how to set up Google Analytics after upgrading can be found here.

Method 2 –

In this method, you needn’t spend much. All you need is a custom domain for your site. If you have already purchased a custom domain and mapped it to your site, well and good. Else, according to the current plans and pricing, in order to use a custom domain, you need to have an upgraded plan – be it Personal, Premium or Business.

You can choose the Personal plan, which comes at $2.99 per month along with either a free custom domain or credits to map an existing domain you own – whichever you choose.

Once you have set up a custom domain for your WordPress.com site, you need to add Cloudflare to your site. Cloudflare is nothing but a FREE content delivery network which also provides Internet security services and distributed domain name servers acting as an active reverse proxy for your website. Cloudflare also protects, speeds up, and highly improves the reliability of your website.

Step 1 – Follow the instructions over here to add your site to Cloudflare. It won’t take much time if you follow the instructions properly.

Step 2 – Once you have set up Cloudflare successfully, visit the Cloudflare Apps tab (you must be logged in for the link to work).

Step 3 –  Scroll down till you find Google Analytics from the list of Apps.

Step 4 – Click on the ‘Setup’ button.

Step 5 – If your domain is already set up with Google Analytics, Cloudflare can do the heavy lifting for you and fetch your tracking ID automatically from your Analytics account.

Step 6 – Else if you prefer entering the Google Analytics code manually (like me!), enter the Google Analytics UA code for your domain in the box below ‘Manual Setup’ and click Submit.

Step 7 – Once you set it up automatically or entered your code manually and clicked Submit, that is it. You have now successfully set up Google Analytics on your WordPress.com blog.

Thus I hope this article helped you in learning how to set up Google Analytics on your WordPress.com blog or website. If you liked this post, please share it using any of the social media buttons below.