By Mike Lane.

Google Analytics (formerly known as Urchin) is a suite of amazingly in-depth (and free!) analytical tools for your website. As is Google's standard, they have made it so you can get all of this information for an unlimited number of visitors to your site (whereas statcounter's free version limits you to the previous 100 hits).

That said, Google was surprised to find out just how popular this service would be. The first week or so was wrought with outages and extremely slow pageload times. This caused Google to shut down any new accounts and to disallow the tracking of any new sites for members that signed up before the shutdown. As of the time of this writing (2 Jan 06) Google has not opened up analytics to new subscribers.

This tutorial will guide you trough the process of getting Google Analytics on your Smugmug site when they come back online (or if you're one of the lucky ones!). This tutorial will not cover setting up the Google Analytics service itself and you will certainly not find out any information about when Google is likely to open up for new accounts. This is only about getting Google Analytics on your Smugmug site.

After you are allowed to sign up with Google Analytics go to Google Analytics and sign in.

Click on the Check status link beside the newly created Website Profile.

Select all of the code in the text box (make sure you get all of it!) and copy it to the clipboard (cmd-c on Mac, ctrl-c in windows).

Go to your SmugMug site and make sure you are logged in. On your homepage click on the control panel button.

Scroll down until you see "organize & customize" and click on the "customize" link.

Scroll down until you reach the "footer" box and paste the Google Analytics code as the very last thing in that box (if you have other things in your footer box just make sure the google analytics code is the last thing). Click on Save Customization and you're all set!

Note: I have redacted my tracking code. Make sure yours is in there. This is the most important part of this process.

You can ask questions or discuss this tutorial on Digital Grin.