How to Track Your Blogspot Visitors with Google Analytics

Google has released a service called Google Analytics, which provides tools allowing webmasters to track traffic on their site. It's also an excellent utility for the curious blog writer ,and it's free providing that you accrue less than 5 million hits a month. If your blog is anything like mine, that means it will be free and I can just relax and not make any contingency plans for when it won't be.

Very detailed customizable reports can be created covering all aspects of behavior of visitors to the site in question; including geographic location of sources, average time on site, pages viewed per visit and percentage of new visitors. These reports can be mailed to you periodically or can be sent to others in a variety of different formats. It's a great tool for shining a spotlight on the weaker sections of your blog or just basically kind of spying.

Setting up Google Analytics on a Blogspot page is very simple indeed. You need to get a Google account, and then to sign up for Google Analytics. Then just follow the prompts and enter your site URL and any other details that Google might want to know about, like your mother's maiden name, or the name of your first dog, or how old you were when you first did it.

After a few steps they will give you a code segment, which you should copy to the clipboard. You then need to sign in to your Blogger page and click on “Template” and then “Edit HTML”. Next, scroll down to almost the bottom of the page and paste the code segment just before the tag. Click “Save Template Changes”.

You have done it, you have cut the jewel, but it's not party time yet. The jewel must be polished, which is just my way of saying that you should check to see if everything is working. To do this, reopen the Google Analytics window and click “Continue”. If all has gone well, under the "Tracking Status Information" heading you should see "Waiting For Data" and "Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now". Have you ever felt such joy? Well have you ever?

Anyway, your blog just became an East German two bedroom flat and you an outwardly stern (but privately quite sensitive) Stasi operative sent to keep tabs on the mysterious and beautiful ballet dancer that lives there with her cat. You'll probably end up falling in love with her and be forced into some cruel choice or something but, whatever, with Google Analytics now installed and operational you will need to wait a couple of days or so before you begin to see data.

Then it will start to trickle in. All the secrets and all the lies. Trickle, trickle, trickle. That maddening trickle; bittersweet and beguiling all-at-once, that will keep you coming back again and again. You sicko.