I just wasted 30 minutes trying different methods of configuring Google Analytics in my new Jekyll blog. There are enough posts on Stack Overflow and enough blog posts with suggestions but none of them worked well.

TLDR:

Open _config.yml and add this line:

  google_analytics: UA-12345678-1

That’s it. No need to change head.html or header.html. No need for a plugin. This works for the minima theme.

Explanation

Recent versions of Jekyll use a different directory structure. By default you don’t have _includes and _layouts directories. So you can’t really see what your current theme is and how it works. A theme is a Rubygem and with this command you can see where it is installed.

bundle info --path minima
/var/lib/gems/2.5.0/gems/minima-2.5.1

To show the contents of the theme you can use this command:

tree `bundle info --path minima`

You may have to install tree if you don’t have it.

It will show you the directory structure and the files. When you open _includes/google-analytics.html you can see that the tracking script is already installed and you only have to put your tracking code in _config.yml.

You can find the full explanation here: jekyll-docs