How to set up Google Analytics for websites: If you've read any of the articles on my site, you know that I love to nerd out with data. Seriously, I'm a data-driven marketer to the core. But even for those who aren't as obsessed with analytics as I am, it's important to understand the importance of analysis in marketing. The ability to track what works and what doesn't is crucial if you want your business or blog to succeed online. And one of the best places to start when it comes to tracking is Google Analytics.
A quick primer: Google Analytics is a free tool that measures how users interact with your website. It tracks information such as where they come from and how long they stay—and it's incredibly easy (and free!) to set up on your site. In this article, we're going to walk through exactly how you can get started with Google Analytics (GA). By the end of this post, you'll be able to set up an account for yourself and start collecting valuable insights about your traffic sources so that you know where your website visitors are coming from!
Google Analytics is a free service that provides website owners with detailed statistics about their site traffic. It is a powerful tool that helps you understand your website traffic and optimize your website, making it an essential part of any business's digital marketing strategy.
Google Analytics is an analytics tool that helps you understand how people use your website. When someone visits your site, they generate activity data points — these are stored in the “Data” section of Google Analytics as raw numbers (for example: “Pageviews”). The tracking can be customized based on goals or events on your site by creating custom dimensions or metrics before running reports. Data can then be viewed through web-based dashboards or downloaded into spreadsheets for further analysis with other data sources such as AdWords campaigns or Google Search Console accounts (formerly known as Webmaster Tools).
As a website owner, you may be curious about the key metrics of your site. You can use Google Analytics to answer questions such as:-
You can also find out where people go after leaving your site.
If you want to know how much traffic your website is getting, Google Analytics will tell you. If you want to know what keywords people are using when they search for something on the Internet, Google Analytics can tell you that too.
In other words, analytics help you understand who your audience is and what they like. They also act as a guidepost when it comes time to make decisions about content creation—if there's something a certain segment of your audience really likes, then consider writing more articles or blog posts about that topic!
The first thing you need to do is sign up for a Google account, which you can use to access your Analytics data. If you already have a Google account, great! You're halfway there. If not, no worries—it's easy to set up one.
Once signed in and ready to go, navigate back to the main menu of your website and find where it says "Google Analytics." Click on this link and then click on "Sign Up For Free." This will bring up another page asking for some basic information about yourself: an email address where GA will send notifications (it's best if this is not associated with any other GA accounts), the name of your business or website (this should be identical to its domain name), and an account password that's easy enough for humans but hard enough for bots.
If all goes well here (no typos!), then congratulations! You're now ready to start building out reports within Google Analytics itself.
To get a basic understanding of how the Google Analytics tool works, you should create an account and create a property.
You can create a property by following these steps:
First Step of Set up Google Analytics
The first step is to head to the Google Analytics website and click on "Get Tracking Code." Once you're there, paste your website's URL into the form.
The next page will present you with some options for tracking code. Select Universal Analytics from the list (if it's not already selected) and click Continue.
You'll be given a snippet of code that can be added to any web page or CMS system with ease. Copy this and paste it into your site's HTML where you want Google Analytics tracking code installed—this can vary depending on your web host's specific setup, but generally speaking, it goes at the end of every HTML file before.
The Tracking Code is a small snippet of code that allows you to set up Google Analytics to track and report your site's traffic.
To set up Google Analytics for websites, and add the tracking code to your pages. The tracking code should be added to the section of your pages. It should also be added at the bottom of each page, right before.
The first thing you want to do is check that your tracking code is working. To do this, visit your website using a smartphone and make sure that the tracking code is being sent to Google Analytics. If it doesn't appear on mobile devices, then there's a problem with the way the tracking code was set up or installed. You may need to contact an expert for help with this step if you're unsure how to fix it yourself!
If you know how to add a piece of code to your website and have access to Google Analytics, the first thing you need to do is set up Google Analytics.
Yes, it's completely free to set up Google Analytics, and there are no contracts or commitments required. You can sign up in less than five minutes.
No. You can set up Google Analytics on your website in just 10 minutes – no coding or technical know-how required. Just click on the “Get Tracking ID” button, add the code to your website and you’re done!
Google Analytics updates every 24 hours, and more often if there are a lot of website changes or traffic. It’s important to note that this is as fast as possible, and not instantaneous.
At this point, you should be ready to start using Google Analytics on your website! This tool is really useful for tracking your website’s data, and even better, it’s completely free. As we’ve seen, there are many ways to set up Google Analytics depending on how much information you want about your website. You can easily set things up so that you can view all of the site data in the Analytics interface or just see a few key numbers in your WordPress dashboard.
Either way, this is a great tool for understanding what content people love and what improvements you might need to make. If you want even more information about Google Analytics and how it can help with your marketing efforts, check out our post on how to use growth-driven design with Google Analytics!
Finally, if you want to get help setting up or set up Google Analytics (or any other marketing system) that will help grow your business online—get in touch! Our team at SmartBug Media is here to provide expert advice on digital marketing best practices that will help grow your business online.
