How to Use Google Analytics on a WordPress.com Blog

New! Take the poll! The CloudFlare solution in this post isn’t trivial to set up. Would you be willing to pay for a solution that allowed you to run Google Analytics on WordPress.com if it was simpler, full featured and hack-free? View poll results here.

Like many people looking to start a blog I initially found myself drawn to the WordPress platform. The fully hosted and free solution provided by wordpress.com is especially attractive if you don’t want the overhead of managing a self-hosted WordPress blog. Unfortunately, one of their many restrictions is that you can’t use Google Analytics. Instead, you have to use their built-in WordPress analytics tool.
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