How to add analytics to a Ghost site

Ghost sites are often a publication and a newsletter at once, so the question that matters is which sources bring members, not just readers. The steps below install the tag and add a few lines that record a signup event when a new member confirms their email.

How to install VisitTrack on Ghost

1. 1

   Step 1: Copy your site id

   Add your Ghost domain as a site in VisitTrack and copy the snippet from the install step. Replace SITE_ID below.

2. 2

   Step 2: Open Settings → Code injection

   In Ghost Admin, open Settings (the gear) and find Code injection under the advanced settings. You'll see Site header and Site footer.

3. 3

   Step 3: Paste the tag (with the queue stub) into Site header

   The first line is VisitTrack's queue stub: it lets the signup snippet in the next step call the tracker before the deferred script has loaded.

   Site headerCopy

   <script>window.visitrack=window.visitrack||function(){(window.visitrack.q=window.visitrack.q||[]).push(arguments)}</script>
   <script defer data-site="SITE_ID" src="https://visitrack.app/tracker.js"></script>

4. 4

   Step 4: Count confirmed member signups (Site footer)

   When a new member clicks the confirmation link in their email, Ghost brings them back with action and success parameters in the URL. This snippet turns that into a signup event. Check the address bar after a test signup to confirm the parameters on your Ghost version.

   Site footerCopy

   <script>
     // Ghost adds ?action=signup&success=true when a new member confirms
     // (older versions used action=subscribe).
     (function () {
       var p = new URLSearchParams(location.search);
       var action = p.get("action");
       if ((action === "signup" || action === "subscribe") && p.get("success") === "true") {
         window.visitrack("signup", { source: "ghost_portal" });
       }
     })();
   </script>

5. 5

   Step 5: Save

   Click Save. Code injection is live immediately — no theme upload or restart.

How to check VisitTrack is working on Ghost

1. Open your site in a private window and read a post.
2. VisitTrack's live view shows you within seconds; posts appear by slug in the Pages tab.
3. Sign up with a test email, click the confirmation link, and check the Signups tab — the signup event appears with the source of that visit.

Does VisitTrack track Ghost page navigation?

Ghost themes render each post, page and archive as a full page load, so every page is a pageview. Paginated archives (/page/2/) have their own paths. The Portal popup (sign up, sign in, account) opens over the current page without changing the path, so it doesn't add pageviews.

How to track custom events and goals in Ghost

Ghost's Portal runs inside an iframe, and VisitTrack's script deliberately doesn't run in iframes — which is why the signup snippet above reads the URL of the page members return to instead.

To see which calls to action drive signups, add data-vt-goal to the Portal buttons in your theme (they carry data-portal="signup"), and data-vt-scroll to the end of your post template to measure read-through. These are theme edits; upload the theme zip again afterwards.

<a href="#/portal/signup" data-portal="signup" data-vt-goal="subscribe_click">Subscribe</a>

<!-- at the end of post.hbs -->
<div data-vt-scroll="post_read_to_end"></div>

Make signup a goal in Settings → Goals, and build a funnel post page → subscribe_click → signup to see where readers drop off.

Revenue attribution on Ghost

Paid memberships go through Ghost's own Stripe checkout, which doesn't pass a VisitTrack visitor id, so those payments can't be attributed — connecting the same Stripe account would bring in payments VisitTrack can't match to a visitor. Member signups by source (above) are the reliable growth metric for a Ghost publication.

Script options you might need on Ghost

All optional — add them to the same tag. Full reference: script configuration.

Ghost troubleshooting

Not on Ghost? See all 29 integration guides.