Oops! I Made a School-Girl Error!
Last week I decided to make a change to two of my niche sites in an attempt to improve AdSense CTR so I changed the theme on the sites. One thing that I noticed is that as soon as I did this my traffic dropped down to 0. It looked as though the sites had dropped out of the Google index but that kind of thing happens sometimes so I just ignored it and figured it would come back on its own in a few days.
Anyway, I was actually away staying with a friend for most of last week so I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on but I’m back at home now and when I looked at analytics I noticed that both these sites are still sitting at 0 traffic. That just doesn’t make any sense – but I suddenly realised what happened – I insert the Google Analytics tracking code manually in the footer file of my theme and when I switched themes I forgot to do that for the new theme – DOH!
One of my twitter followers, Paul Zagoridis pointed out that it is better to use a WordPress plugin to manage Analytics as then no further changes are required when changing themes. As I am not in the habit of changing WP themes very often it’s not something I had thought of using a plugin for before but I think it would be a good one to use for my niche sites in the future.
Unfortunately that’s not the only thing I screwed up… One of the reasons that I assumed the site had dropped out of Google was that in addition to getting no traffic reported, I also wasn’t seeing any AdSense impressions which seemed to correlate my assumption. However, what I had also forgotten to do was alter my theme files to use my AdSense publisher ID and not that of the theme author! So in fact I have no idea how much traffic these two sites have had over the past week and how much money they made! It’s probably not very much but of course I don’t know if my theme change has had the desired result so I need to leave things as they are for at least another week before I can draw any conclusions.
Moral of the story – don’t work on Sundays :-)
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Richard Farrar
October 26, 2008
We all make these silly mistakes from time to time. I’ve done exactly the same thing with Google Analytics myself before; probably because I always have the code in the footer.
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