One of our “must have” plugins is Google Analyticator by Ronald Heft. It will let you track the traffic on your WordPress site using Google Analytics. The best part is that it will give you an admin dashboard widget that shows how much traffic your site is getting every time you login to WP admin (see below).
But recently we ran across some problems with Google Analyticator after we moved our site from MediaTemple to MDD hosting. For whatever reason simply pasting in the Google analytics ID number didn’t work. Google Analytics wasn’t receiving any of the tracking information, so we had to go for the alternative option to authenticate the plugin (and site) with Google.
However, when we tried to authenticate the plugin with Google, we got an ambiguous error message from Google’s site:
The site “http://example.com” has not been registered
Unfortunately the error message from Google is quite cryptic and has no solution attached to it.
So how to fix this? It’s relatively easy: go to Google’s domain management site and register your domain.
The tricky part is on the second page of the signup process where it will ask you the “Target URL path prefix.” Simply type in your domain. You don’t need anything else unless your WordPress site exists in a folder – for example: /blog/ or /wp/ .
But for most people, just type the root URL, example:
We found it strange that we never had to do this before considering that setting up a Google analytics account should (in a perfect world) automatically create a domain account but we can’t complain since Google Analytics is a free product.
More background information about this particular issue and other trouble shooting tips at Ronald’s support forum…
Thanks for posting this tip. I was having a hard time figuring out why my Google Analyticator dashboard widget suddenly stopped working. In my case, the problem started after we migrated our Google Apps accounts to the new user authentication structure. I had to reauthorize my site in Google Webmaster Tools all over again using my Google Apps account.
hey Dean, thanks for dropping us a note your experience with the Google Analyticator plugin. It does suck when they change things around and the messaging is cryptic at best.
Even following these steps it still doesn’t work on any of my sites. Instead of the domain not being “registered” it says…
The page you have requested cannot be displayed. Another site was requesting access to your Google Account, but sent a malformed request. Please contact the site that you were trying to use when you received this message to inform them of the error. A detailed error message follows: AuthSub target path prefix does not match the provided “next” URL.
hi Stef, I would suggest three things to try:
1.) Create a Google webmaster account and add your site/URL to it.
2.) Clear your browser cache and cookies.
3.) Make sure you have the latest WP 3.2.x and updated Google Analyticator plugin.
We have multiple authors on blog and previously hen i was using official analytics wordpress plugin all pageviews of a particular author’s all posts were being displayed in “custom variable value 3” … now after analyticar it is only showing up one author’s pageviews not the pageviews of his/her posts
what should i do?
hi Nadeem, I usually don’t do targeted custom tracking like that. Have you looked at the WordPress.org forum messages to see if someone else had a similar issue.
http://wordpress.org/tags/google-analyticator?forum_id=10
Sorry can’t help more at this point.
Did you see this page about using custom variables possibly with the Analyticator plugin? http://goo.gl/rSpdx
Thanks a ton! Finally authenticated hehe, helped me out with a site I was working on 🙂 Here is my thank you gift:) http://goo.gl/vsEvY
Glad it was helpful Josh! And thanks for the diagram I am sure it will help others! 🙂
Great tip, thank you Noel – very helpful.