I can’t say strongly enough how much I recommend doing this.

Google Analytics tracks the visitors to your website, tells you exactly how they got there and offers hundreds of other interesting reports and statistics.

When you start to build traffic to your site, through the methods I will start to talk you through in the next chapter, you will want to be able to access and look in to the results of your efforts.

Say, for example, you follow a technique for getting people to your website from Facebook, and then another for getting people to your website directly from search engines like Google, Google Analytics will show you, by any date range you specify, how much of your traffic has come from each source.

It will also show you where people click on your site, what people were searching for on Google or any other Search Engine when they came across your site… in fact, there is very little to know about a website that Google Analytics is not able to tell you.

But perhaps best of all, it’s completely free!

I’m going to run you through how to install Google Analytics on your WordPress website.

First of all, visit the Google Analytics website and sign up for an account: www.google.com/analytics

You’ll be asked to fill in some basic information such as the address of your website and an account name. You can call your account whatever you like.

When you’ve finished filling out the various forms, you’ll eventually be given your tracking code:

However, you only need to select one small part of this code, so highlight the piece of code that starts ‘UA-‘ and is followed by a combination of dashes and numbers. Here’s an example:

This is your unique Google Analytics ID.

Copy this code to your clipboard and click ‘Save and Finish’ at the bottom of the page:

Now, go back to your WordPress dashboard and select the ‘Add new’ option from the Plugin menu as before.

Type into the search box ‘Ultimate Google Analytics’.

Install the ‘Ultimate Google Analytics’ plugin:

Activate the plugin:

Now dropdown the ‘Settings’ menu on the left hand menu and select the ‘Ultimate GA’ button:

Now finally, on the Ultimate GA settings page, paste your Google Analytics ID into the box…and click ‘Update Options’:

You’ve now installed Google Analytics on your WordPress website.

The next day, when Google has had the chance to gather sufficient data, you’ll be able to login to Google Analytics and see how many visitors your site has received and access lots of other useful reports.

It really is a fundamental tool for developing a successful website, so it’s worth taking the time to learn as much as you can and use the data it provides.