Intro
If you have a website, you need to use Google Analytics! Google Analytics can help you answer questions such as how many people visit your website, where visitors to your site come from, which pages on your website get the most traction, what blog content visitors like most and more. Here are a few things to do to help you get started with Google Analytics.
Getting Started…
Here‘s how to set up a Google Analytics account so you can start collecting basic data from your website:
- Create or sign in to your Analytics account:
- Go to google.com/analytics
- Do one of the following:
- To create an account, click Start for free.
- To sign in to your account, Click Sign in to Analytics.
- Set up a property in your Analytics account. A property represents your website or app and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.
- Set up a reporting view in your property. Views let you create filtered perspectives of your data; for example, all data except your company’s internal IP addresses, or all data associated with a specific sales region.
- Follow the instructions to add the tracking code to your website so you can collect data in your Analytics property.
- Watch this video if you need any help.
After you’ve made an account
Here are some additional steps you can take after creating an account:
- Grant permissions to make configuration changes and to interact with data. Learn more about user management.
- Link your Google Ads and Analytics accounts so you can share data between them and develop a more comprehensive understanding of how your marketing efforts drive user behavior on your sites or apps. Learn more about linking your accounts.
- Set up reporting views so you can align Analytics users and relevant data. Learn more about views.
- Set up goals to identify the actions you want users to take on your site or app, and to give a monetary value to those actions. Learn more about setting up goals.
- Browse the Solutions Gallery for dashboards, custom reports, and segments that you can use in your Analytics account.
Modify your tracking code to collect additional data such as:
- User interactions with links, buttons, video controls, and other dynamic elements of your site or app. Learn more about event tracking.
- E-commerce activity like user engagement with product lists and internal promotions, and how successfully users moved through your purchase funnel and checkout process. Learn more about eCommerce and enhanced-eCommerce data collection and reporting.
Google Analytics Academy
Here‘s a simple and detailed tutorial to watch which should help you go from beginner to at the very least novice in terms of your Analytics abilities. While it does take time to complete the course, I assure you it’s worth it.
Another tutorial I strongly recommend
Here‘s another detailed blog with a complete guide and video to set up Google Analytics. Andy Crestodina (the creator), has a simple 52 step guide to get started with Google Analytics. In my opinion completing this guide, accompanied by a blog article he wrote, will help a lot more than the course by Google.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is an extremely helpful tool to fulfill your analytics need for any website(s) you may be responsible for. It is a fast way to get information that you can’t obtain on your own. Hopefully, these steps help you get started with Google Analytics, and pairing this with one of the above tutorials makes you a comfortable user. Good luck!
