So, exactly what does it do?  Well, quite a lot on top of building a a Sitemap.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Is it easy to use?

If I’m honest, easy to use is an understatement.  Simply install and activate the plugin, and then click the “Rebuild the Sitemap” button in order to create your first sitemap, although this does take a while to build initially, from here on it is zero maintenance.

This, though, is just the default configuration.  In order to do anything more than just notify Google of updates and create your sitemap you need to configure the plug-in options.  You will need to configure it to notify Bing (formerly MSN Live Search, which was formerly MSN Search) or Ask Jeeves you will need to configure the plug-in.  Further, in order to integrate it with Yahoo search you will need to get a Yahoo developers key.

In order to truly give the best user experience they should enable all of this for you, creating a truly quick and easy user friendly install.

Does it work as expected?

Does it work as expected? Yes. If you want to see what it churns out, take a look at the Inspired By Wordpress sitemap which was generated by this plugin.

I can’t really pick a fault in the functionality of this plugin. It seems to work perfectly.

Conclusion

A pretty awesome plugin all in all. I can’t find any real fault in it, once set up you can just leave it to do it’s own thing. It’s not a complex plug-in in the slightest. Once it is set up it is quite literally set-and-forgett. Do you have any thoughts? Any alternatives? Let me know!

By using a plugin to add this code, the need to modify your templates code in order to install Google Analytics is removed, saving valuable time.  On top of this, if you are a newbie this will then make your life much easier preventing you from having to search through code that may become damaged if the wrong part is removed.

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Is it easy to use?

Very much so.  Simply sign up for a Google Analytics account, or login with your Google account and add your wordpress website as a new profile, then copy the UID and paste it into the UID box on the Google Analyticator settings screen.

The Settings Screen for the Google Analyticator Wordpress plugin

What next?  Click the link to authenticate the plugin to work with Google Analytics and then change the drop-down to read “Enabled”.  Finally, scroll to the bottom and click “Save Changes”.  Job Done.

Does it work as expected?

More so, the amount of functionality this plug-in offers is truly amazing.  You can control everything from what hits it tracks right round to where it places it’s code in the theme template.  At first it is a little overwhelming looking at all of the available options, so I’m glad that all of the advanced configurations are already set, minimizing the amount of work that the user has to do.

Here’s the full list of features quoted from the Wordpress plugin directory.

• Supports standard Google Analytics tracking
• NEW! Includes an admin dashboard widget that displays a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches
• Includes a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• Supports outbound link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Supports download link tracking
• Supports event tracking with outbound links / downloads instead of the old pageview tracking method
• Allows hiding of Administrator visits without affecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Supports any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Installs easily – unlike other plugins, the user doesn’t even have to know their Analytics UID
• Allows tracking code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Provides complete control over options; disable any feature if needed
• NEW! Supports localization – get the settings page in your language of choice

As you can see the list really is quite extensive, I really cannot see what is missing from the huge list of features available.

The plugin even includes a Dashboard widget which allows you to track your stats without ever the need to login to the Google account.

Google Google Analyticator Dashboard Widget

As you can see from the screenshot above the plugin automatically imports a lot of information from Google Analytics including a Graph, the Top Pages, Top Referrers and the Top Searches.  This Dashboard widget can be very helpful with tracking your sites progress without having to sign in to an extra online server, I personally rate this small feature very highly.

Conclusion

It’s easy to use, it’s feature-full and it works.  What more could you ask?  Weather your a wordpress pro or a wordpress beginner I would suggest that you install the Google Analyticator.  I can’t find much that doesn’t seem useful, even if it’s not useful for your current project you will soon find yourself using it in the future.

Top Marks.