As is common for many people these days, I write a blog: OneFortyWines.com. Yay for me, right? I do this because I am passionate about wine, and I think that people who read the site find it interesting. The problem is that I don't *know *if they do or not, because I'm not sure who reads the blog (outside of my mom).
I used to know a lot about my audience, because I had a custom WordPress installation running and was able to install Google Analytics. Eventually this became too much of a headache for just a hobby, so I migrated over to WordPress.com to host my domain and blog.
I'm guessing that the majority of people who use WordPress.com for their blogs fall into these same categories:
- People who are NOT technically savvy enough to handle hosting and managing their own WordPress installation (and/or)
- People who simply don't want to deal with it. This is after all, why WordPress exists, no?
I didn't realize it at first, but in doing so I no longer had the luxury of Google Analytics on the WordPress.com implementation, as WordPress doesn't support this feature. Instead, WordPress offers their own proprietary analytics offering, which seems perfectly fine. However I have multiple sites, including non-WordPress sites, and I would like to have continuity in the analytics and tracking systems I use.
Equally troubling was the fact that I couldn't migrate over the reporting history from Google Analytics into WordPress. There may be a feature that supports this, but again, it's not something the average user is going to do. The chart below will illustrate this issue I'm experiencing, as I moved off of WordPress.com in December 2009 and back on again this month.
This
is where the CloudFlare Apps feature of our service came in extremely handy. One of the ways that CloudFlare makes sites easier to manage is by enabling popular apps for the domain owner - in this case, it was Google Analytics. Since CloudFlare is optimizing and delivering your site's content to your visitors, it inserts the Google Analytics JavaScript tracking code in the proper place as your site's visitors pass through our network. Your site now benefits from both WordPress.com site analytics and Google Analytics.
Enabling Google Analytics via CloudFlare Apps is a really cool feature that took a total of about 2 minutes for me to setup. There are plenty of other cool apps that are available as well - and the best part is that the CloudFlare service and many of the CloudFlare Apps are completely free!