Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring your websites traffic, from referral’s to search engine activity.

Hopefully you have heard how powerful Google Analytics is and of course, you can’t beat the price of free.  For those that are not as familiar with Google Analytics let me give you a brief overview and how Google Analytics can benefit you.

Google Analytics tells you how visitors found your website and how they interact with it. You’ll be able to compare the behavior and profitability of visitors who were referred from each of your advertisements, keywords, search engines, and emails, and gain valuable insight into how to improve your site’s content and design.

However large or small your site, and however you drive traffic to it – whether it’s unpaid search, partner sites, AdWords, or other cost-per-click programs – Google Analytics tracks it, from click to conversion.

For those that are leveraging Google AdWords (Google’s Pay Per Click PPC program), Google Analytics will provide you with the actionable information that you can use to increase your ROI by tracking cost data for all of your campaigns and combining that data with conversion information on a page-by-page basis.

Google Analytics automatically imports Google AdWords cost data so that you can track the effectiveness of your AdWords campaigns, and automatically tags your AdWords destination URLs to track keyword and campaign conversion rates with no effort on your part! To find out more about AdWords, please visit the AdWords home page.

Recently a client asked for help on how to install Google Analytics on their website and because Google Analytics can be intimidating at first we wanted to provide Google Analytics setup instructions for others to learn from.

This blog post is designed to ease you into the Google Analytics application and teach you how to use Google Analytics. We will provide advanced Google Analytics tips in future blog posts so make sure you subscribe to iClick Solutions RSS, join us on Facebook or Twitter.

Install Google Analytics With Google Analytics Setup Guide at iClick Solutions and learn about important website metrics and get insight into website visitors below:

Step 1 – Set up Google Analytics

1. Go to Google Analytics and click “Sign Up Now” under the “Features” thumbnail.
2. Enter the Google account name (e-mail address) and password and click “Sign Up” again.
3. In the next window, provide Google with the URL website address of the website you wish to analyze with Google Analytics.
4. Give the website an account name that is easy to remember. If you will be tracking multiple sites, this is especially important.
5. Select the country your site is based in, or the country it is serving. Then select the appropriate time zone. Tip – If your site is based in Australia but all your users are in the United States you may want to select a U.S. time zone to figure out when in their day most choose to visit your website.
6. Click Continue.
7. In the next window, provide your contact information.
8. Click Continue.
9. In the next window, read the Google Analytics terms of service. If you agree with them, click the Yes box.
10. Click Create New Account.
11. Google will provide you with Google Analytics (GA) Javascript code.  This code is mostly the same for every website except for 1 critical difference – your account number that looks like UA-XXXXXXXX-1. Copy this – you’ll need to insert it into your web site just above the closing /body tag.

Step 2: Insert Google Analytics JavaScript Into Your Pages
You must insert the code into every page you want tracked. If you have a technical person who takes care of your pages, have them add the code for you. Contact iClick Solutions if you need help with this step.  Many websites that are on a content management system or eC0mmerce platform will have a module or single file you can edit that places the Google Analytics code on every page of your website.

Step 3: Analyze the Data

This is where it starts to get fun and somewhat addicting for those analytical types.  For example, if you want to find out whether your site has peaks during certain times of day or on certain days of the week, Google Analytics can tell you by following the steps below:

1. In the menu to the left, click on the word Visitors.
2. To the left beneath the main chart, you’ll see a number of different statistical breakouts.
3. Click on any of the words to get a bar-chart breakout of the daily performance for that aspect of site traffic measurement.
4. If you want to learn hour-by-hour trends, click on the word Hourly above the bar chart to see an hour by hour graph for the time period at hand.
5. To compare two different time periods, click on the dates above the line graph. Select the first set of dates you want to work with, check the Compare to Past box, click on the second set of dates, and click the Apply Range button.

Here is a great video that walks you through some of the features inside Google Analytics:

After setting the tracking wait a few days so Google Analytics can start tracking some data as Google Analytics is not real time. We recommend you only check the statistics once a week and then analyze your traffic, top traffic pages, what keywords bring your traffic, what kind of visitors you get, and so on.

Here are a few other Google Analytics tips:

• The process requires a Google account. If you don’t already have one, just sign up for a free account.
• Once your account has been set up, you can add more than one Web site to your tracking options by adding the source code to all the Web pages that you want tracked.
• The account name that you fill in during the Google Analytics setup process will be the name that appears in the Google Analytics reports.

• You should consider excluding internal traffic by going to: Analytics Settings => Edit => “+Add Filter”: and put in your internal IP address.
• Capture internal search stats if your website has a search tool on it. With this feature you can you see what a visitor put into your internal search box, what page they were on when they made the search and what page they chose in the search results. Any internal search will work as long as it passes the search variable through the URL.
• On the account information page, the only required field is the Country/ Territory information; you needn’t divulge any other personal information.

I hope you found this Install Google Analytics post helpful, and if you have any questions, leave your comments below or contact us if you don’t want to ask your questions in public.

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