Google Analytics is a powerful and free tracking tool for webmasters, with more than 56% of websites using Google Analytics. It can measure many data points, including:
Read our latest guide that will walk you through how to add Google Analytics to your new website in as little as 10 minutes.
If you haven’t done so already, you’ll need to sign up for Google Analytics.
First, click on the “Sign Up” button via the Google Analytics homepage.
You’ll then select “Website”, name your account, and fill out other information such as your website URL and industry category.
After that, you’ll then review Google’s data sharing options and click on the “Get Tracking ID” in the lower left corner of the screen. GA will then provide you with your tracking ID.
If you’ve already set up your Google Analytics account, but don’t know what your tracking ID is, then we’ll walk through how to find your tracking ID below.
Step 1: Log into your Google Analytics account
Step 2: click Admin on the lower left side of the screen
Step 3: Under “Account”, select your account from the drop-down menu.
Step 4: Pick your desired property.
Step 5: Select Tracking Info > Tracking Code in the property column
Step 6: Your special tracking ID starts with UA
Step 7: After you have identified your tracking ID, you’ll need to get your tracking code fragment, which is the Global Site Tag (gtag.js). The gtag.js is the monitoring code for this particular property and you will need to copy and paste this code on any web page you wish to track on your website.
There are two main ways that you can implement your Google Analytics tracking code - either through Google Tag Manager, or as a Gtag.js HTML code that’s placed on the header of your website.
Follow these steps if you want to add your GA tag using Google Tag Manager:
Step 1: Select “Build Tags” and choose Google Analytics
Step 2: Next, you’ll choose “Universal Analytics”
Step 3: Name your tag and add your Google Analytics property ID.
Step 4: Select the tracking method, such as PageView, for the event to trigger and record in GA
Step 5: Select your firing triggers - selecting one such as All Pages will ensure that your tag will fire on each page of the site.
If you would rather insert your Google Analytics tracking ID on your site directly, you can add it as HTML code into the <head> of your website pages.
You can work with your website developer to do this, but if you’re working on a WordPress website, you can use the “Insert Headers and Footers” plugin to manually add the GA code to your desired pages.
After you’ve set up your Google Analytics tracking, you’ll want to make sure that it’s tracking properly in the GA dashboard.
The first way to do this is to view the “Real Time” report in Google Analytics. Browse your website in incognito mode - as you enter multiple pages, Google Analytics should reflect the pages that you’re entering. Note: it can take a few hours for your website to reflect the insertion of your tracking code.
You can also use Google’s Tag Assistant extension for Google Chrome to ensure that your tracking code has been implemented and is firing correctly.
The extension will show you any events/triggers that are being fired and what errors are occurring for tags that you’ve inserted for your website.
Now that you’ve set up Google Analytics, you’ll want to do a couple of other things. The first is setting up tracking goals.
You're going to have to pick the kind of target you want. They include:
Google Search Console is a powerful platform to help advertisers and webmasters obtain useful search analytics and results.
You may do things like:
To set it up, press the gear icon in the lower left corner of your Google Analytics dashboard.
Outside of linking your Search Console and setting up tracking goals, there are a few other things that you may want to do in Google Analytics, which we’ll cover below.
I cover this in my latest article on granting user permissions in Google Analytics, but here’s a quick rundown:
Google Analytics helps you to set up your files so that you can only see the statistics and measurements that matter to you by "views."
You should set it up, though, only to get the details you want to see. You might have a view that lets you see just organic search traffic. Or maybe you just want to see the traffic in social media. Or you want to see the conversions from your target market.
Much of this can be achieved by views.
To install a new view, simply follow the following steps:
You can also link your Google Ads account with Google Analytics.
Now that you’ve set up Google Analytics, be sure to check out some of our other resources to level up your Google Analytics knowledge:
