Wordpress Howto 04 – Installing Plugins and Google Analytics

In this howto I show you how to download and install the semiologic google analytics plugin so that you can track visitors to your site and gather useful stats.

Read the full article for a full transcript

Wordress Tutorial
Installing a Plugin
Connect with FTP and Upload a Plugin
Install and configure the Semiologic Google Analytics Plugin

Hi and welcome to the fourth episode of the wordpress video how-to podcast. Today what I’m going to do is show you how to install a plugin, more specifically I’m going to show you how to install the Google Analytics plugin which I think is the first plugin you should be installing. Google analytics basically gives you stats for your web site. It gives you how many people are visiting it, how they are finding it, when they’re leaving, all that stuff. So I think it’s really important for any web site let alone any wordpress blog. So we’re going to have to have to take a sidetrack because before you can install a plugin you have to be able to ftp to your web site.

So wether you are using Mac or Windows I would definitely reccomend using the filezilla FTP program. This is free, it’s open source so they’re not going to try to hit you up for money, it works great, and that’s what I’m going to show you in this tutorial. So the address you want to go to is filezilla-project.org. I’ll put a link to that in the show-notes as well.

So what you want to do is just click download the filezilla client, and make sure to choose for mac or Windows. I’ll be showing you how to do this on the mac but it’s the same for every OS. So you’re going to go ahead and download and install Filezilla, and that will bring up the filezilla application.

So the first thing you will want to do, you can do a quick connect just by typing in your host, username, and password, but it’s easier if you set up a profile so you don’t have to do this every time.

So I clicked that button in the top left and I’m going to do a new site, and I’m going to rename this site and I’m going to call it my wordpressvideohowto. So in the host you type in ftp. and then the address of your web site. So mine is ftp.teachmewp.com. Don’t worry about the port, it’ll get filled in automatically, login type you do have to change to normal. User – now this is the same username you had entered when you signed up for your hosting account, same username you use when you log into your cpanel. So I’m going to enter that here and I’m going to enter my password.

Now if you’re security conscious you could also have it ask for a password. This does mean when I enter it here if someone stole my computer they could actually log into my website account. But I’m going to type it in and I’m going to hit OK.

So now I’ve created a profile. If I click here I”m going to see it and if I double click on it it’s going to flip though and connect. So on the left side here I have my computer, on the right side I have my web site. And you’ll seee some stuff here. Most of the stuff that we’re going to be paying attention to is going to be in the public_html folder. So I’m going to minimize this for now and we’ll come back to it later.

Now I’m going to take another quick side-trip here. Today we already know what plugin we’re installing, we’re going to install the google analytics plugin, but there are hundreds or even thousands of plugins that you can install on your blog. So I’ll show you where to find them. One thing is you can just search google, just search for wordpress plugin and what you are looking for, but you can also just go to wordpress.org and that will bring you to the official wordpress site.

If you go to extend, and go to the plugins directory you’ll see that there are 2431 plugins.

Now that I’ve shown you all of that the plugin we’re installing today the Semiologic Google Analytics plugin isn’t actually in the directory. So I’m going to go to their web site, I will show their address at the bottom of the screen. here’s all the information. And I’m going to download it, so I’m just going to click on it. So here it is, you’ll see it’s a folder and usually there is several files in it, this one is pretty simple there is just two files.

So you don’t have to do anything with these, you just have to drop this folder into your plugins directory. SO now I’m going to load up Filezilla and we’re going to connect to my site and you’ll see up here once it stops going we’re now connected. And like I showed you before we’re going to go into public_html and the information we’re looking for is in the WP-content folder, and for plugins we want plugins.

You’ll see there is just one here so far. And now what we’re going to do is we’re going to copy over the plugin that we just downloaded. And it’s as simple as just dragging and dropping. And there we go it’s finished so I’m going to close out of filezilla.

Now that we’ve closed the application we need to go activate it. You’ll need to do this for any plugin that you install. And first login to your control panel. That’s your domain name /wp-admin and we’re going to go to plugins and we’ll see all the plugins installed on our blog. So the one that I want here is google analytics and you’ll see it’s not activated here, inactive. And all I have to do is click on Activate and you’ll see now it changes here, it’s showing in a different color and it’s showing deactivate and it’ shows here it’s active. Almost never will you need to edit a plugin.

Now what you need to od is to set up a web site profile with google analytics. To get there the address is google.com/analytics. You’ll want to sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you have a google account already for google apps or for gmail you can actually sign in with that account. So I’ve got an account already I’m going to sign in.

And regardless if you have a lot of sites or if you have no sites yet what you need to do is go down here to add a web site profile. I want to add a profile for a new domain. I’m going to put in the full URL. teachmewp.com. And here it shows the information, and now we need to get our tracking code. So for this plugin you do have to use the legacy tracking code, the urchin.js so that’s what I’m going to get here. Make sure you’ve got that selected and click here, it should highlight all of the text here.

And I’m going to copy it and then I’m going to go over to my blog and I’m going to click on settings. We’ll see a new option here for google analytics, this comes from the plugin we just installed. And I’m going to click in here and paste in my google analytics script. I’m going to go down and update options. And that’s it – I’ve installed gogole analytics.

I’m going to visit my site and make sure it’s not broken. Everything looks good. So then what I want to do is go back to my google analytics page, go down to finish. So now it’s working, you’ll see it says waiting for data, says it’s been successfully installed and data is being gathered. Now that it’s been installed I’m just going to show you quickly the kind of reports it’s going to give you.

So I’m going to go to view reports. Of course I have no data yet, but here you’ll see a neat little bar graph of visitors, you’ll see how many visits, all kinds of information here, where your visitors are coming from, and this one here si my favorite. This actually will show you how people got to your site, if you searched what terms they searched for, what are your most popular sites, all of the kind of information a webmaster is going to need.

So there we are we installed our first plugin, you’ll see that the web site doesn’t look any different and that’s just because this isn’t a plugin that changes the look. OVer the next couple of weeks I’m going to install some more plugins and you’ll see some new functionality in the site. So as always if you have any questions go ahead and go to the web site teachmewp.com and leave a comment. After the next tutorial you’ll also finally be able to send an email to podcast@teachmewp.com but as of right now it still is not active.

That’s al for today, have a great day.

Questions?
Comments?
Topics you’d like to see?

Visit the web site teachmewp.com
or Email: podcast@teachmewp.com