Have you ever thought that the data you receive from an analytics program like Google Analytics is totally wrong? Perhaps it is. However, for many website owners, the problem is they have forgotten the one basic rule of website analytics. Proprietary trackers like Google Analytics need to have the tracking code installed onto every page you want tracked.

Generally speaking, a blog makes life easy for you. Place the code in the blogs footer section and it will automatically appear in every page. There is one proviso – make sure the footer is the area that has the /body tag – if it doesn’t then you will need to find where that closing tag is. Your analytics code should appear immediately before that closing tag.

For web site owners, you will generally need to include the code every time you create a new page. This is fine if you use a template, the code can be embedded into the template right from day one. Every time you create a new page the tracking code will be included.

If you have a website that has a lot of pages and want to start tracking them – you can look forward to a lot of work installing the code on each page. Google has some advice on how to get it done quickly:

try a program like PSPad. With this program you can do a search/replace in files so you could download all your sites pages to a folder, search for “” and replace with “GA code + ” then re-upload your files.

The bottom line is, if you don’t have the code installed then you cannot track the activity on those pages. Obviously, if you don’t want a page tracked – don’t use the code. However, for analytics to be effective as part of your SEO, you need to be able to collect all the data available. They only way to collect that data is by having the analytics tracking codes on every page you want tracked.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 3:49 am and is filed under Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.