Google Analytics on wordpress.com -My findings
Well I am sure you a have reached here after a quite a bit of search about enabling Google Analytics on your free wordpress.com blog. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that, it is possible if you have a custom domain setup on wordpress.com. If you don’t have, you are out of luck temporarily.[you can always buy one 🙂 ]. Since this post is NOT about how to get around setting google analytics, please head over to the last paragraph for the instructions. But before you go there let me just warn you a bit about how my efforts fared at this attempt and what I gained and what I lost.
Google analytics is just awesome, and i will miss it badly. I had it for a month and it was just great. Yes, i undid the workaround I had done a month and a few days back. The issues that I had were of page load times. Pages with a lot of images like this one that gets the most vistiors on my blog took more than 17 second to load (yes i tested them personally, and average page load time for the same page on Google Analytics was 14secs.) Now after undoing the work around it has considerably reduced like (8 secs).
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What was surprising was a few days back when I checked I had this message popping on the site, which was nothing I had done. Well a close investigation said that it was protecting the security of my site and was put up there by cloud flare guys. Well this is a bit annoying to me in the first place, I cant even imagine how bad it would be for a user who came here due to a search engine. Should be disappointing at the very least. I am not sure what triggered this, it could have been a setting change I did or it was something default of theirs, but regardless of who is to be blamed, I don’t like it and i do not want it. The page load times and the security was more than enough for me to stop this hack around. To me happy readers matter more than the stats.So i will sacrifice the in depth stats for now.
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I am not advising you to stop from trying, i am just sharing my set of thoughts and issues. If you feel its worth the hassle, please feel free to try them from here. [I wonder why two pages for it though, cheap pageview tactics] My recommendation would be, Its better to host your own blog elsewhere [Not on wordpress.com] and have tracking. Remember there are no Free Lunches 😉 if they are they are probably not great.