Integrating Google Analytics with 'wordpress' platform

The Client

The client owns a popular French cookery blog.

The Need

The client was using 'wordpress', which is a personal publishing platform, to host the blog. They wanted to implement Google Analytics to track the traffic flow to the website and also evaluate the most popular traffic channels.

One of the main challenges of this implementation project was that everything had to be implemented within the 'wordpress' framework. So all plug-ins had to be tested for compatibility with the 'wordpress' platform.

The Solution

• To begin this process, team Nabler first had a detailed discussion with the client to understand their blogging objectives. This helped in clearly defining the goals for Google Analytics implementation.
• Based on the insights shared and also the general trend among blog traffic, the 'Traffic Ecosystem' was defined. This was based on the various inbound and outbound links for the blog. For the client, it comprised mainly of the Direct Traffic (here referred to as Blog Traffic), Blog Subscribers and Referring sites.                
• The main task for the team was to find suitable plugins and testing them for compatibility with the 'wordpress' platform. These mainly comprised of the outbound links, downloads and custom variables.
• Based on this, they went on to create Profiles & Filters for the Google Analytics account.
• 'FeedBurner' was integrated with Google Analytics. Earlier, the subscribers were not being tracked and therefore we setup a 'FeedBurner' account and integrated it with 'wordpress'. This helps in getting information about a blog's RSS Subscribers.
• The client had 'site search' enabled for the blog and wanted us to track it.
• Event tags were implemented wherever there was some visitor engagement without generation of a new page view.
• After this, to check the setup, different Event & Custom Variable Reports were reviewed for quality and accuracy.
• Once the setup process was finished, a measurement and reporting framework was setup. Customized dashboards were created in the Google Analytics reporting suite. These dashboards were categorized as follows:

The Benefits

With the help of this implementation, the client gained insights about their blog traffic in terms of:

• Where the visitors came from
• How they found the blog
• What keywords where used by them to get to the blog
• How they used the in-built 'site search', the keywords searched for on the blog

It also helped them in:

• Understanding the role of social media channels in drawing traffic to the blog
• Tracking of the outbound links and the various downloads from the blogs
• Viewing customer interaction on different pages with the help of 'Event tags'
• Optimizing the content on the blog based on the type of traffic coming
• Simplifying the reporting process with the help of automated dashboards which breakdown the data into simple visuals