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Who, What, When, Where, Why and How questions we ask pretty much every day. And as you blog grows in size – maybe even becoming part of your business- it makes sense as this question about if to Google analytics is a simple way of keeping track of who visits your site, what they do when they get there, when they show up, where they’re visiting from, how they interact with your content, and even why they showed up in the first place. So instead of being in the dark about what works with your blog or what doesn’t, you get a constant stream of information all about it.

Throw in some easy-to-figure-out and rather pretty graphs and you’re all ready to manage your blogging empire faster than ever, with a bird’s eye view of what makes your readers tick. In this short video, we’ll get you set up with Google Analytics for your self-hosted WordPress blog.

First off, you’ll want to head to: http://www.google.com/analytics. And if that sounds too much typing just run a search for “analytics” in Google, and that will be the first result you see. When you get there, if you already have a Google account- maybe from Gmail, Google Calendar, or Google Reader, for instance- you’ll want to sign in. If you don’t have one, clicking over here will remedy that in about a minute. Once you’re signed in, click here to sign up for the analytics service. You’ll want to put in the URL of your blog, a name for your account, which could be the name of your blog, or your name, or something about unicorns, whatever works for you. Set your country, and then your time zone, and click here on “Continue”. On the next screen, you’ll want to add some contact information. I’ll spare you sitting through my filling out the form, but if you want to follow along, you can pause the video now to get this part done.

Finally, I get the Terms of Service, which I need to agree to, and I get the option of editing the default data settings if I’m not comfortable. I click on “Create New Account”, and the next thing I’ll see is a chunk of code. This is important, so copy paste it to a plain-text editor, but not a word processor like Word or Pages, or leave the window open in tab of your browser. We’ll come back to that in a moment.

Now, to get setup with WordPress. There are two ways you could do this: manually, or via one of several plugins that streamline the process for you. To use a plugin, head to the Plugins, add new section, and run search on “Google Analytics”. There are plenty to choose from, so if you decide to go this way, each has its own set of instructions. If you prefer to do things the manual way, without using the plugin, here’s how to do it: You’ll want to head back to Google Analytics and copy that chunk of code you were given to your Clipboard with a right or control click. And then – back in WordPress – go to the Appearance menu and select the Editor option.

Next, you’ll want to open up the file called “footer.php” from the sidebar over here. When that appears in your editor, paste in the code you copied from Google Analytics just above the part that reads forwards slash body. Click update the file and you’re set. Now, back on the Google Analytics side, I’ll click “continue” and that will take me right to my account overview. I can see next to the name of my blog that the status icon here is telling me that the account hasn’t synced up yet with the WordPress. Don’t let this worry you; it can take up to twenty-four hours to get up and running and start the sharing the information you want to track. If – after that – you still have problems, check the inline help to make sure you did everything right.

Analytics has a range of filters to help you track down the information you’re looking for, as well as easy ways to add other blogs, web sites, and users to your account, in addition to offering customizable reports that can be sent out right to your email account, There’s also a huge range of help documentation and videos that you can check out to get familiar with what’s on offer and how to get the best out of your Google Analytics experience.

Once you’re set up, and your account is synched with your blog, you’ll be able to drill down into information about who is using your site, how they’re using it, where they’re coming from, and a host of other useful information that will help you track and monitor the goals you have for your blog. So that’s getting started with Google Analytics for WordPress: putting you in touch with the who, where, what, when, why, and how of your blog’s visitors.