As I’ve written about Google Analytics quite a bit on this blog it’s probably quite obvious that I think very highly of this free service.  Making sure that you have the code installed on your site properly is a very important initial step.  The problem is that once you have it installed the only way to know if you have it installed properly is to sit and wait for the service to begin collecting data.  If you have a gigantic website, like a huge college website, then even when you are collecting data sometimes you aren’t even sure if every page is collecting simply be cause you have thousands of pages.  Luckily there are a few options to help.

Installing Tracking Properly

Remember that you want the code installed as close to the closing body tag as possible.  Although technically there is no reason for this, the service will work just fine if it’s installed in the header of your page, it is considered a best practice.  Because it is loading an external element to your page you don’t want it slowing down the load time of your page for your user, so making sure that the rest of the page is loaded before trying to load external tracking is good for your user.  This is a best practice for any external javascript tracking code not just Google Analytics.  While it’s true that Google has some of the best and most nimble servers in the world you would rather your visitor being at the mercy of your web server loading properly first than an external service.  If your server is down then the last thing you care about is tracking a visitor.

(UPDATE: As Paul Prewitt points out in the comments installing the code at the bottom is only for basic setup.  If you are going to be performing advanced tagging and tracking of files then you need to make sure that the tracking code is called earlier on the page than these functions.)

SiteScan

SiteScan is a free service that will scan your site checking to make sure that you have your tracking code installed on every page of your site properly.  It will also report on any additional tracking parameters that you have set on a page.  Because this is a bot that crawls your site it is only able to crawl pages that a normal bot would be able to crawl.  Meaning that it follows robot.txt and cannot crawl password protected content.

SiteScan also offers paid level services that will crawl large sites and can be scheduled to

Firefox Add-on Checkers

I mentioned WASP in my Firefox Add-ons post months ago.  WASP will show you which analytics tracking code, if any, is on a page.   WASP is also fun for when your surfing the web to know what tracking your favorite sites are using.  Ok so maybe I’m the only one who finds it kind of interesting to know what analytics other websites use.  It is best to get WASP off their website instead of the Firefox Add-ons site.

GA? is another Firefox Add-on that will tell you if Google Analytics is installed on the page properly or not.  I haven’t used this add-on because it seems limiting compared to WASP, but it is still worth mentioning.

Conclusion

Of course it’s always true that you could simiply visit every page of your site and View Source to see if Google Analytics is installed on a page or not.  That just seems like too much work and with these wonderful tools you don’t need to do it.

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