How to Add Google Analytics to Blogger

There is probably not a more interesting real-time or site statistics tool than Google Analytics. If you haven't used it before you'll find that it blows away the Blogger stats tool in the Blogger editor. I haven't added it to Blogger Tips Pro earlier since I've been intending to create the tutorial - but kept putting it off for other reasons. I do use it for my other sites, however.

Let's get started. If you don't have a Google Analytics account yet you just need to sign into your Blogger Google account to start. Now, if you have a large number of blogs under a parent name or company then I would suggest you monitor all of your sites from a single account. You be the judge.

Creating a Google Analytics Account

Once you're logged in, simply go to http://analytics.google.com - you should see a page like this. Just select 'create an account':

Now that you're into the main sign-up page just click the 'Sign up' button to start:

You'll now be presented with a number of options to get your account started. I chose 'Website' and 'Universal Analytics' as my options to start. I felt that the benefits of the Beta would be good to try out.

Scroll down the screen to find the rest of the options  - enter your 'Account Name', 'Website Name' and 'URL':

There are some more options near the bottom of the sign-up screen called 'Data Sharing Settings' and I will let you pick and choose if you want to opt-in on those. Once you've done that just click on the 'Get Tracking ID' prompt at the bottom of the page, accept the Terms and Conditions and you're ready!

Adding Your Analytics ID to Blogger

You'll be brought into the main page with the 'Tracking ID'. One point to remember is that the ID is tied to a specific blog. If you have more that one blog be sure to go back in and create another ID for a different blog.

I've highlighted the ID below - this is the ID you're going to want to copy and paste into Blogger. Be sure to copy this ID right now by highlighting it and using a mouse click copy:

Now, go back and log into Blogger - open your specific blog - and choose the 'Settings', 'Other' menus and scroll down to the bottom of the form to find the 'Google Analytics' entry field like this:

Add your analytics ID in the empty field as I have above and press 'Save Settings' in the upper right of the screen. Your blog is now ready and monitoring all users hitting your site.

Viewing the Google Analytics Data

The best part of the analytics screens is just the overall breadth of what data is provided. My goal in this tutorial is not to give you an in-depth view. You can take a look at this step-by-step tutorial. However, go back into your Analytics account to get to the reporting data.

The main page you want to look at is the 'Reporting' screens where you'll see your traffic and other analytical information:

Here is a snapshot of one of my old sites with the type of data you'll see in your main Google Analytics dashboard:

My favorite view in the Analytics page is the real-time view of who's hitting the site. Here is BloggerTipsPro.com literally minutes after I added the ID:

You can see that a desktop, mobile and tablet hit the blog and what pages are being access. That is a very cool view of your site's traffic. There's so much more you can do with what Google provides. Enjoy!!

Posted By my pwiki2:51 PM

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Best Blogger Templates - 2014

So, this might be one of the most difficult posts that I have written on BloggerTipsPro.com. I have to start off by first apologizing to the creative authors out there that have produced some amazingly beautiful Blogger templates for the world to use. That said, I have some unfortunate comments to make to my readers that may or may not persuade you to use what Google provides out of the box or just to go get one of these templates.

Here it goes - I have spent many, many hours and days trying to find any template out there that qualifies as a 'best Blogger template' and found nothing - absolutely nothing. I've gone through hundreds of websites all pitching either free or paid Blogger templates and not a single one has made the grade of what a Blogger template should be. People have pitched their templates directly to me to add to this site but still did not qualify in my mind.

Blogger Templates are not Wordpress Templates

The problem - web designers totally understand page layout and design - however, they do not understand Blogger templates. Part of that must be blamed on Google for not adequately explaining the technical aspects of the template.

You see, Blogger templates are not Wordpress templates or vice versa. Yes, CSS design is the same but the deeper technicalities are not. What I have found in almost all cases (there are some exceptions I will explain) is that the web designers have taken Wordpress template CSS code directly or modified and just replaced it in Blogger.

Most of the websites pitching 'Best Blogger Templates' out there are all using the very same core of templates from a Creative Commons set that have be placed in the marketplace for free - many come from these sites (Templateify, Soratemplates, Templatism, Premiumbloggertemplates, Bloggertipsandtricks, Mybloggerlab, etc. dot-com. I won't honor these sites with links since I personally don't think they are in the spirit of what a blogger template should be - you are free to add the .com to each and take a look). These are great designs - don't get me wrong.

The Blogger Template Designer

What they all missed was the very essence of a Blogger template - the core template designer from Google. Since you the readers are aware of the Blogger template designer in out of the box templates you know that you can modify many of the parameters of each template - from colors, fonts, widths, outlines, etc. If you're not familiar with what I'm saying - here is an image of the designer with the sections I just mentioned outlined:

However, in the case of the templates offered in the marketplace, they've missed this point completely by stripping out the template designer code from Google and just pasting in other CSS code. The template designer is configured to allow you to modify CSS without knowing CSS - a key point!

Now, is that a bad thing overall? No, it isn't earth-shattering. However, by removing the template designer you're stuck with what you get with their templates and cannot modify them without having deeper CSS knowledge to edit the CSS code directly. Many bloggers do not understand CSS code - and the beauty of the template designer is that a template author could provide user enabled modifications down to the deepest CSS levels - it is fully extensible.

Consequences

What that means for you the reader is that if you install one of these free templates you are stuck with the look-and-feel unless you know CSS (Want to learn? Go to Code Academy - Web Fundamentals). Your only other option is to install another template from scratch. If you don't mind doing that then by all means do so - there are some very nice designs out there. Just be aware of the consequences when you do that.

I did find a few template offerings out that that did use the template designer - but, unfortunately, they just modified the Google templates directly which I think is a copyright violation since there are no Creative Commons licensing statements in the Google free templates. You are much better off just using a Google template and extending it directly as I showed in the tutorial - Build a Basic Wordpress Theme in Blogger.

Or, if you're really ambitious, learn how a Blogger template works, strip out all of the CSS and build your own resell-able templates with the template designer.

I would love to hear some feedback from both users and authors on this post. What have you found? Are you an author that I missed? Are you wondering if some templates you have found qualify?

Posted By my pwiki12:06 PM

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