Learning Objectives

• Add Google tracking to your website

Google Analytics

Ever wondered how many people visit your website, how long they spend on each page, what they are looking at, and where they are coming from? Google Analytics can provide these answers and many more.

To use Google Analytics, you need to have a Google account. This tutorial will not cover setting up a Google Account, getting a tracking code, or analysing the analytics. It will cover adding a tracking code to your GitHub website.

Adding Google Analytics to Your Site

The Analytics code should be added to every single page you want tracked. We can make this easy by using templates and _config.yml file.

Conveniently, the site theme we are using already has a code snippet for Google Analytics so we just need to add in our tracking code to the config.yml file.

The code snippet in the templates looks like this:

<!--
    
      <script type="text/javascript">
        (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
        (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
        m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
        })(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
        ga('create', 'UA-90204097-1', 'auto');
        ga('send', 'pageview');
      </script>
    
-->

Make sure that is copied to the bottom of all of your page templates.

In the _config.yml file in the website repo:

google_analytics: place tracking code here

It might take some time before you have enough data in Google Analytics to actually track but you should have enough data after your first workshop.