Setting Up Google Analytics [Beginner's Guide]

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Now that you’re all set with a website and got your marketing strategies in place, you now have to focus on making sure that your efforts are working. To do that, you need to know how many people visit your website, from where, what pages they visit, and how much time they spend on your pages. To achieve this, you’ll need a tool that can help you understand how your website is doing.

Google Analytics is among the many powerful tools that could help you assess and gauge your site's performance. To give you an idea, Google Analytics is a tool that will help you understand your Web traffic and gain true, actionable insight. Many companies have been using this software to improve their business, and with these useful tips, so can you. Google Analytics is a free, hosted Web analytics tool that generates detailed statistics of a website’s performance. The data can be used for the following:

·    Know what channels bring in the most visitors

·    Improve user engagement

·    Enhance user experience

·    Identify pages with the least and most pageviews

·    Develop a better marketing campaign

·    Plan a strategy to get more leads, sign-ups, or transactions

Once you’ve decided to use Google Analytics, you must first install it. To do so, follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Sign up and set up your properties.

If you already have a Google account that’s associated with your business email address, then all you have to do is sign in with your existing account or visit this page, and click “Create an Account” in the upper right portion. When you’re done signing up, you’ll be presented with the setup screen with different options and settings that can be used to organize and analyze your account.

You can have up to 100 Google Analytics accounts and 50 website properties under one Google Analytics account. You can practically set up your Google Analytics account whichever way you want—it’s just a matter of how you organize your sites. You can rename your accounts and properties if you want.

Step 2: Add tracking codes.

Choose Universal Analytics for your tracking option and finish the setup by copying and pasting the tracking code on each page of your website. The installation will depend on what type of website you have.

Step 3: Set up goals.

Configure a small but very useful setting on your website’s profile on Google Analytics. This would be your Goals setting. Click the admin link at the top of your Google Analytics and then choose Goals under your website’s View column.

Step 4: Set up site search.

This option is for any website with a search box on it. It will allow Google Analytics to track any searches made on your website so they can learn more about what your visitors are searching for in specific pages.

Tip: Don’t let anyone like your Web designer, Web host, or Web developer create your website’s Google Analytics account under their own Google account. If you ever part ways, they can take your Google Analytics data with them and you will have to start all over.

Posted 26 October, 2015

Angela Gaddi

Freelance Writer

Angela writes about IT security, privacy, free speech, politics, social media, and the intersection of business and consumer tech. Has a special aptitude for privacy, cult literature, film noir.

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