How To Set Up Google Analytics
Getting started with Google Analytics couldn’t be easier.
So you’ve recently taken the first step towards digitally transforming your business by getting a business website. Nice work! Soon you will begin to reap all the rewards that an online presence can bring.
Are you ready to take your digital prowess to the next step? Do you want to get your hands on awesome data sets and see where your site visitors are located, how many people are visiting your site every day, and how your site traffic changes day to day, month to month, and year to year? Then it’s time to get to know Google Analytics.
Once upon a time, entrepreneurs and first-time webmasters had control of their website and the handful of pages therein, but unless they installed one of those fancy black and green counters that kept track of how many visitors came to their site there was no way of accessing this valuable data, let alone other significant data points that they could use to become an online superpower.
Those days are long gone. Google Analytics keeps track of all these different data points, then presents them in a neatly organised format, making it easy for you to gain an insight into the activity on your business website. Knowledge is power, so as soon as you have this info at your fingertips you can tailor your site to your customers’ needs, increase site visits, drive business, and become a virtual wizard more powerful than Dumbledore.
So how do you get started with Google Analytics? Follow the six easy steps below:
- Go to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign into your account. If you don’t have an account, come out from under that rock and sign up for a Google account immediately.
2. Click the “Access Google Analytics” button in the upper right corner of the page.
3. Fill out the form on the setup screen. Most of these fields are pretty straightforward, so we won’t walk you through them.
4. Install your tracking codes. This is not as techy as it sounds, we promise! It may use that scary word “code”, but it just comes down to a little bit of copying and pasting. Start by copying your tracking code, then find your site’s HTML code. This looks like a lot of strange words, slashes, dashes, etc.
All you need to do from here is perform a quick “Find” to locate where it says </head> and paste your tracking code exactly as it appears immediately before this. Then click Save and you’re done!
5. If you want to check that your tracking code has installed correctly, go to where you copied your tracking code from and it should say, “Status: Receiving Data”. This can take up to 24 hours to display so don’t worry if it doesn’t appear straight away.
6. Set up a second admin. Sometimes even Google gets a little bit confused, and you may find yourself not being able to access your data, which can be a real pain. We always, always, always recommend a backup. You can get a second admin set up from the Admin screen within Google Analytics. Google spells out exactly how to go about this here.
So there you have it: give Google up to one day to get things rolling and you’ll be inundated with important website data.