Basic Google Analytics Fail
May 1st, 2009 | by Conrad Walton |You how I was bragging the other day about how all this web development stuff was child’s play for me? About how I’ve been doing it since 1994?
Well, pride goes before the fail.
Well, pride goes before the fail.
I checked Google Analytics the next day. (You do have Analytics set up, don’t you?) My traffic went down! What happened? I watched for another day and traffic was still down! Something must be happening, but what?
Then it hit me.
I forgot to put the Analytics tags into my new template files.
I was so worried about how the buttons looked and cross platform testing that I forgot the basics.
When you ever publish a new site, go over the checklist and make sure that you didn’t forget the basic stuff. I’ll try to get together and publish a good checklist for pre-launch web sites in another post.
Now, I’ll just sit quietly in the corner.
Fair Winds and Calm Seas,
Deborah Leon
www.mermaidspurseseaglass.com
Conrad:
Enlighten me, what should someone do to add the Analytics tags into a template? I do not know what that means…
Google Analytics is the free stats program. There is a tag that they give you for each web site you are tracking. That tag needs to go into the footer of the page. I forgot to put the tag into the footer, so it never sent any data to Google to be tracked.
http://www.google.com/analytics