How to install Google Analytics on your website.
As business owners, it is really important that we keep an eye on how our different marketing tools are performing. If you have a website, would you find it useful to know how many people are visiting your site, how they’re finding it, and what actions they’re taking within it? Thanks to Google Analytics you can get all that information for free.
As part of the Google Marketing Platform, Analytics is far-reaching and universally trusted. In fact, it’s estimated that 48 million websites use it.
So, what does Google Analytics really do? How do you install it on your website?
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you analyze web traffic, advertising ROI, and the impact of video and social networking sites and applications. We think of Analytics as a sleek, highly advanced, interactive dashboard that lets us take a look at high-level user psychology as well as at individual clicks, scrolls, and much more.
What does Google Analytics track?
There’s so much that Google Analytics can do, but at its base level, it tracks key user data like session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, source of traffic, and the path users take through a site.
There’s also dozens of custom reports you can generate, from conversion reports to site speed reports, which let you see how quickly users are able to interact with your content. And, of course, it integrates seamlessly with other Google products like Google Ads, Google AdSense, Search Console, and more.
How do I use it?
All you need to create an account is a website and a Gmail email address. You start by going to the Google Adwords page and creating an account. Once you’ve set up an account, it’s time to install code on your website. After that, it’s all up to you. Google offers a robust support center to help users get started with Analytics and level up to Analytics 360, an even more powerful tool that offers tools like BigQuery Export (a Google Developers tool that enables super-fast queries of large data sets.) Data nerds, rejoice.
How do I install the code?
Basic steps are as follows. Hint: you’ll need access to your website’s code or Content Management System (Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, Wordpress, etc.)
Create a Google Analytics property
Copy and paste the global site tag on each page you want to measure
Set up data collection according to your type of site (static, dynamic, etc.)
Verify the global site tag is working
Get analyzing!
Full steps and much more detail can be found from the real-deal experts, Google, right here.
Now what?
It can be intimidating to wield such a powerful marketing tool. That’s why our team has spent years learning how to glean actionable insights from Google Analytics to help our clients reach their goals. We’d love to help you, too. Send us a message if you’d like to find out how.