Setting up Google Analytics

If you have a website and need to know how many people are visiting, where they are coming from, and what areas they are viewing (etc) then you need Google Analytics. There are some other metrics available but with Google being the world’s number search engine it makes sense to use Google metrics, especially if you use or intend to use Google AdWords.

Screenshot of Google Analytics

In order to setup Google analytics on your website, just follow this guide for full details.

• The first thing you need to do is sign-up for a Google Account at: https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageAccount
• Once you have an account setup, log into it and find the section called ‘My Products’.
• In the ’My Products’ section, Click the link called Analytics.
• Once in the ‘Google analytics’ area, look for (and click) and link called ‘Add Website Profile’
• In the ‘Add website profile’ area, fill out the ‘Website Address’ and ‘Time Zone’, then click Finished.
• In the next page you will see a lot of text very similar to this below:

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-1110811-25");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>

• This code will then need to be added to every page in your website; If you are a programmer then this will offer no problems and would probably be placed in footer.php or some similar type of included file.
• If you are using a Blog, CMS, or other ‘prebuilt’ application, then you will need to find out where the footers are, or perhaps look out for a module, component, etc which adds Google analytics to your website; You will need to put the code above into this.
• If you’re website has been created from scratch the you will need to look for the following tag: </body>, and place the code above it, on every page that needs to be monitored.
• Once you have done one of these, then check the Tracking Status (on the same Google page as the analytical code, at the top of the page).

Once the Tracking Status shows that Google is receiving Data then you can be confident that Analytics is fully setup and ready for you to view your metrics (after around 24 hours of setting it up).

Tags:  EBusiness, google, SEO