A total beginner’s guide to setting up Google Analytics for your website
Our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics teaches you how to set up an account that is linked to your site and recommends a couple of basic metrics to look at.
Google Analytics is a free of charge service that tracks and reports website traffic. Providing insight into the demographics of site visitors, the performance of a specific campaign, and how long people are staying in your site for, are just a few of the many things the program is capable of.
This data gives you an all round better look at of how your site is doing and allows you to understand what improvements can be made to make sure you’re optimizing different areas regarding maximum conversion.
In the below tutorial, we will walk you by means of some basics of Google Analytics and what you must do in order to get started.
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Set up an account
For those who have a major Google account such as Gmail or YouTube, you are eligible to create a Google Analytics account by following the below instructions.
This account should be only seen by YOU. Of course , you can authorize other people to act on your behalf if necessary. However , you will not need them to take full control over your data.For example , ClickZ has granted me access to the business account, but I cannot change account and property settings. This is done to protect the publication and ensure that if I leave, additional admins will still have access to the overall account.
In comparison, I can do whatever I want with my personal Google Analytics.
Add tracking code to your website
Google Analytics are unable to work until it is linked to your websites. When you finish developing a new account, Google will ask you to “Get Tracking ID. ” Click on the button and you will see your code.
You can always go back to your tracking information under “Property. ”
This code needs to be added to every single page. How to do the installation depends on your content type. For instance, some Tumblr templates only require the Universal Analytics (UA) code, as show below.
While some blog platforms like WordPress may ask for full script, if you create a website with HTML files, you can edit HTML and substance the code just before “ </head> ”.
Today many sites like ClickZ are using Google Tag Manager to implement tracking code.
Manage your site search
As soon as you connect Google Analytics along with your website, you can set up site search to learn what visitors are looking for on your website.
In “View Settings, ” turn on site lookup tracking and enter your website name and URL. The query parameter is normally “s” or “q. ” You can determine yours by searching on your own site.
For example , if you enter “mobile” into ClickZ’s lookup bar, you will see s= (ClickZ’s query parameters) followed by your problem.
You can also contact your company’s web growth department to identify the query parameter for your site.
After you save all the settings, Google Analytics will be able to track any searches made in your website.
Goal set up
Aside from site lookup, you should also set up a goal so Google Analytics can track important routines on your site. For example , an e-commerce platform may trigger a confirmation page for every placed order, or even a digital publisher may create a “Thank You” page when a viewer subscribes to its newsletter.
To set up a goal, go to “Goals, ” create “New Goal, ” and choose “Custom” under “Goal setup. ” Then go to “Next Step” where you can name your goal (“Subscribe Success” for example) and select “Destination” if an activity ends on a “Thank You. ” If your conversion goal is one step further and you’d like your visitors to watch a video after they have reached the Thank You page, then you can add “Event” tracking to your goal set up in order to calculate this.
Each goal type has its requirements and can end up being customized to what your own personal KPIs are. In the example of “Subscribe Success” below, I made a decision to forego “Destination” and go straight to “Event” in order to measure sales.
Google Analytics will start measuring conversation when a referred to activity is induced. You can create up to 20 goals in your website.
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Basic Google Analytics metrics
You can customize many Google Analytics reports based on your needs. But in “Audience Overall, ” you can find some simple yet useful numbers around your website.
Take our cousin publication Search Engine Watch (SEW) for instance : you can view positive adjustments in pageviews and sessions from last September to date. Hovering over the line will highlight the number of pageviews and sessions for a particular day. (We’ve deleted some of the data below as we don’t want to give away all the secrets! )
Beneath the graph, Google Analytics lets you know more about the number of users, bounce rate, average session duration, and also the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors.
Beneath those major metrics, Google Analytics also shows demographics of SEW’s readers, including their countries, different languages, and devices where they consume articles.Other more in-depth metrics include audience report, acquisition report, behavior report, and conversions report. For example , once you have linked social media marketing and Google Analytics, you will be able to track a particular social media marketing campaign and get related stats under “Acquisition. ”
We hope you’ve enjoyed our very first installment of Google Analytics for beginners. Stay tuned for the next in the series soon!