I began running Google Analytics here this morning, and even with just a tiny amount of data to work with, I can tell it's going to be a useful tool. I signed up for an account as soon as they were available last year (before they shut down open enrollment), but I heard there were problems caused by user demand overwhelming the service, so I never bothered to set it up. I finally got around to it today, and I thought I'd describe how I set up Google Analytics on a TypePad site like this one, since it's an easy but not necessarily intuitive process:
- Copy the relevant javascript from Google Analytics.
- Create a new "Link" TypeList and configure the Notes to display as Text.
- Add an item to the new TypeList and paste the javascript into the notes.
- Add the TypeList to your site at the very bottom of the right-hand sidebar. (I'm not certain, but it appears that this is the only location that will work, since it puts the javascript just before your site's </body> tag, as per Google's instructions.)
I should also note that it's important to filter out internal traffic (from your domain or IP address), particularly on low-traffic sites (uh, like this one). Setting up these filters is pretty straightforward in Google Analytics, but you have to remember to format the filtered IP address properly. According to their instructions:
Remember to use regular expressions when entering any IP address. For example, if the IP address to filter is:
192.168.1.1
then the IP address value will be
192\.168\.1\.1
That's it. More to come when there's some data worth taking a look at.
tags: google analytics typepad