To be specific this is actually the “free” version of Social Analytics+ that we are offering on the site, the paid version have quite a bit more functionality.

To get started head over to the product page and click on “Social Analytics+” from there you can access the “free version“.

Free Version Registration Form

Fill in some quick data and submit.

Success!

Now within a few seconds, maybe a minute, you should have a mail at the address you gave with your login information and the “tracking pixel” information you will need to start the process.

Email confirming registration with your details

So from here we now know how to login to view the activity and of course what the link, “tracking pixel“, is to add to our app, site, etc. In my case I decided to try it on my own blog: fridaymorningreport.tv

So since I decided to add it to my blog, which is WordPress I’ll now need to login to my admin account on the blog and under “appearance” I will need to edit my blog files directly (a WordPress Plugin would be a nice approach as well and… well you’ll just have to wait and see on that).

WordPress Editor

The area I want to place the pixel I’ve decided will be in the “header.php” file which is part of most every page on the site. I also decided I wanted to place the pixel right after the “body” tag.

Section to add the tracking pixel

So now I will paste the tracking pixel from the mail into the code here.

Tracking Pixel in place

However before saving, I’ll need to set the {user_id}, now if my blog required a login or had several members I could track by the WordPress built in tag for “logged in user” however as I am the only one who logs in, I’ll just use a “timestamp” from PHP to do this.

Modified Tracking Pixel with PHP timestamp

The PHP for that timestamp is the following: ‹?php echo  time(); ?›

Hit “Update File” and you are basically all done with setting up the tracking.

Now as I only added a 1×1 pixel to the site there’s nothing visible on the site itself, however in the backend the data is already live and being collected. In this case since I used the timestamp every click is a new “visit” which is not ideal and why in the next blog post I will be showing you how through the use of “Facebook Connect” we can really start to get the “social” aspect of the tracking and then able to better see how things are moving through the site.

Simple Tracking