Get insights about your blog's audience using Google Analytics

24 Mar 2016

A critical aspect of having your web presence is to be able to understand and gain insights about how your audience is interacting with your blog. Google Analytics is the defacto standard to enable analytics on your website and for mobile applications.

hydeX provides built-in integration with Google Analytics. To enable web analytics for your hydeX based blog you only need to update your Google Analytics Property ID, hereafter called ga_id, in the _config.yml file.

Before you delve deeper, I strongly recommend you understand the hierarchy of accounts, properties, and views by which Google Analytics organizes the data it collects. For our purpose, we need a Google Analytics Property Id created.

Create Google Analytics Property ID

If you are new to Google Analytics, then the first step is to sign up for Google Analytics. Note that before you land on the Sign Up page you will be required to authenticate with Google using your regular Google credentials i.e. the same credentials you use for other Google services like Gmail etc.

The Sign up page will lead you to Create a New Account and Property page where you can provide the required details about your blog.

Submitting this form should get you a Google Analytics Property ID.

The Property ID would be of the format UA-AccountID-PropertyNumber, where AccountID is numeric and PropertyNumber starts with 1 and increments by 1 for each new property you create.

Integrate hydeX with Google Analytics

Now that you have the Google Analytics Property ID created, next step is to update the same in hydeX configuration file _config.yml. Update the value of ga_id parameter to the property ID obtained in the step above.

Also ensure that ga_enable is set to true or else Google Analytics will not be enabled for your blog.

# Google Analytics Configuration
ga_enable:      true
ga_id:          UA-00000000-0   # replace this

Push the updated config changes to GitHub and you will notice web traffic in your Google Analytics dashboard, after about 5 to 6 hours of publishing the changes.