As I’m setting up my shiny new blog, I stuck at Google Analytics integration. It looks like official PaperMod lacks some documentation on this topic.
So… there is what worked for me.
Don’t use analytics.google.SiteVerificationTag directive.
Use only googleAnalytics: G-xxxxxxx directive.
Create new file in layouts/_internal/google_analytics.html and paste the
entire code snippet you got from GA property setup page.
Basically that’s it.
This partial will be automatically included in every Hugo page. And after your first visit to the page, you will see the firs visitor stats on your GA dashboard. If it doesn’t work immediately, then something is wrong.
Use GitHub search to find setup examples. For example use this search query
path:_internal/google_analytics.html.
Ethics
Thou… I am very triggered about everything anti-privacy… this is a weird situation where I do encounter dilemma. Like… I have no intention to track users, but in the same time I do want to see statistics about my blog. What articles went good, which were bad. And so on. IDK… I will think about this case.
GDPR Compliance
I totally forgot about GDPR rules if GA is enabled. I should implement that banner. Looking for the solution…
I think I will steal for now from
LittleBigTech
with some styling modifications. Looks like I need some z-index to bring that
consent up.
By inspecting the F12 developer tools, I can see that it works. There is no
network requests to Google before accepting the consent.
Later I will look closer to this thing. For now it’s good enough.
Resources
Today I accidentally came up to this PaperMod discussion