Thursday, November 6, 2008

How to Track Blogger.com Pages (Part I)

If you're interested in tracking Blogger.com pages, please see this related post, which shows you a much more effective way of tracking Blogger.com pages:

How to Track Blogger.com Pages (Part II)

As I set this blog up yesterday, I naturally thought it would be helpful to track the page views. I had never added tracking to a Blogger.com page and there are no specific instructions up on WunderCounter.com, so I'll post a quick tutorial here. For the purposes of this tutorial I'm going to use the "Myspace" style tracker. Now, this tracker can be used on sites other than Myspace, so don't worry about the name. It's the right tracker for our purposes.

  1. Log in to the WunderCounter
  2. Choose Myspace Trackers from the Generate HTML menu
  3. Enter the URL of your blog (e.g. blog.wundercounter.com in my case)
  4. Submit the form and copy the code that is displayed on the following page
That takes care of generating the code. Now, log in to your blogger.com account. Once you are on your main blog edit page:

  1. Click the Layout tab
  2. Select Edit HTML
  3. Now inspect the HTML source of your template, looking for the <body> tag.
  4. Paste your tracker code somewhere after this tag
  5. Click Save Template
Now, load up your actual blog page. You should now have an invisible tracker in your blog header. To confirm this, refresh your WunderCounter dashboard page to make sure that your page hits are showing up. If you don't see any hits, make sure you haven't blocked your own IP number. (Check under Options -> Account Options -> Don't Count My Browser if you have a Premium account.)

This is a pure HTML counter, so it doesn't provide referring URLs, but it will provide you with a lot of helpful tracking info. There is, however, a way to add JavaScript trackers to your Blogger.com account and that will be the topic of the next post.

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