For years, I’ve been working with WordPress websites. And, for years, I’ve been using Google Analytics to track visits to those websites. For whatever reason, I always just stuck the Google tracking tag into the footer in the template files.

Recently, I found a great plug-in that eliminates this step. I went out and found it because, somehow, I accidentally removed the code from the footer on this website. I don’t remember when or how I did that, but it became apparent when Google Analytics showed that I had 0 traffic for about two weeks.

The plug-in, Google Analyticator, is great for two reasons: it’s entirely automatic and it puts a snapshot of your analytics report in your dashboard.

To set it up, you activate the plug-in and go to the settings section of the dashboard. There, you can log into your Google account and authenticate your WordPress installation so it can access the Google analytics information. The necessary code is automatically inserted, and you don’t have to worry about cutting and pasting anything.

The snapshot of the stats is also cool. It definitely isn’t the full-featured report you get on the Analytics page, but it’ll give you a simple graph of visits and let you know the top performing pages/searches for the past 30 days.

I love the plug-in so much that I’ve installed it on all three of my current sites: this one, Olinda Gibbons Photography, and Digital Photography How To.