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Google Analytics for Bloggers

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Kevin Sandlin

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We’re halfway through the Digital Marketing class here at General Assembly. One of the biggest challenges in the class is tackling Google Analytics, which is a big, hairy, complex beast of a tool that can either overwhelm you or totally guide you.

If you are or aspire to be a digital marketer, then you must embrace the beast that is Google Analytics, and learn how to use it, piece by piece. Why? Because if you don’t measure it, you cannot manage it, and measuring your web site and marketing metrics is the foundation of digital marketing.

To get over the first big hump that greets most beginner bloggers, I wrote a series of posts for GA on connecting your blog to Google Analytics.

  1. How to setup a Google Analytics account – It’s not difficult, but not nearly as easy as getting a GMail account.
  2. How to connect your Blogger account to Google Analytics – You’d think that, since Google owns Blogger, Analytics would be automatic, but you’d be wrong. Blogger has its own “Stats” package, but the numbers are always different from Analytics.
  3. How to connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics – Manually or with a plugin, and I highly recommend the plugin method. Dirt simple.
  4. How to connect your Tumblr blog to Google Analytics – This one’s the easiest by far. A few navigational clicks and copy/paste.

I was also planning to write a similar post on connecting Medium to Google Analytics, but it would have been a very short post, because you just can’t. I talked to the folks at Medium, and they said they were working on a couple of things in that realm.

  1. Using Medium to blog on a custom domain, instead of medium.com/@yourname
  2. Building their own analytics tools to compete with Google Analytics

You kinda have to take what the folks at Medium say pretty seriously. One of the founders of Medium was a founder of Blogger before Google acquired Blogger, and then that same guy went on to build a little company called Twitter. You know him better as @ev.

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