Setting Up Google Analytics and Rank Tracker

Following on from setting up your blog and publishing your first article, you now need to prepare for measuring or tracking what happens with your site. The 2 tools that you will use are Google Analytics and Rank Tracker, which is yet another module of Market Samurai.

Google Analytics is essentially a tracking tool that gathers data about your website/blog. Things like the numbers of people visiting your site, keywords they've used to find your site, etc. We use and recommend Google Analytics because it's the industry standard and Google is the main source of traffic we want to measure anyway.

Emily Becker from Wordpress Direct guides you through the signup process for Google Analytics and adding your micro-niche blog as a project to your Google Analytics account. Emily also details how you can easily set Google Analytics up to track your website by integrating the account with Wordpress Direct. This is much simpler than manually adding code to your website.

As Emily explains, you will not see data being returned straight away. This is a gradual process, and over time you will see results being returned.

Another tool that you will be using to monitor your website's performance is the Rank Tracker module inside Market Samurai. Ben from Market Samurai gives you an overview of the process involved in getting a top ranking in Google and how Rank Tracker watches this take place and monitors your site's progression through the Google ranks.

Ben then demonstrates how to add your website/blog's URL to Rank Tracker, as well as add your theme and category keyword phrases. The analysis criteria you should set for the tracking is initially just Google as a search engine, include phrase match results, and set a search depth of 'top 1000' initially.

Lastly, Ben takes you through the results you see after running the Rank Tracker and a brief overview of how to interpret the results.

Actions For The Day - 1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account. 2. Add your Google Analytics account to your Wordpress Direct account. 3. Add your domain to the Rank Tracker Module inside Market Samurai. 4. Add your theme and category keyword phrases to the Rank Tracker Module inside Market Samurai. 5. Following the set criteria, run your first update of your rank data.