Introduction
You may have built a great website but, if you have no idea who your website visitors are, where they are coming from, which pages they are visiting, how long they are staying on your site and why and when they are leaving your site, as well as which pages are your most popular ones and how many website visitors you have converted, you could be wasting a lot of money and effort on targeting the wrong type of audience. You need to know the answers to these and many other important questions in order to be able to optimize your website and actually make it effective.
Why Do You Need Google Analytics?This is exactly where Google Analytics can be of immense help, as it can give you a clear insight into your website traffic so that you can know how to improve the performance of your site and ensure your conversion rates keep going up.
Google Analytics is a completely free web analytics tool provided by Google that helps you measure your website traffic and gather vital information about your website visitors. This tool can give you the answers to all of the aforementioned questions and, thus, enable you to see how your website is actually performing.
When you know what works and what doesn’t work, you will know exactly what steps you need to take in order to optimize your website and every piece of content you provide on it with the goal of engaging your visitors and providing them with the information they need.
Since Google Analytics gives you a clear picture of what changes you need to implement to improve your site and maximize your conversions, it goes without saying that your next step towards your site’s improvement should definitely be using this tool.
It is completely free of charge and, given the information it can provide you with, you can be sure that it will help you make your every online marketing campaign result in actual benefits that will lead to the improvement of your bottom line.
When you access Google Analytics as a complete beginner, everything may seem overwhelming at first, but this guide will walk you through it and, by the end of it, you will certainly get the hang of how to use this extremely useful tool to maximize your site’s performance.
Before you get started with Google Analytics, you need to create a Google account. Only with a Google account can you actually have access to Google Analytics, so you can either create a new one or use the one you already have, but make sure that only you have access to it.How to Set up Your Google Analytics Account
Once you have created your Google account, you can go to Google Analytics to set up your new account.
Click on the Analytics tab and you will be sent to a new page, where you will need to click on the green Sign up for free button.
When you click on the green button, you will be provided with the three steps you need to take in order to set up your Google Analytics account. The page you will arrive at will look like this:
Click on the Sign up button and you will be asked to fill out the necessary information for your new account.
Step 1: Sign up for Google Analytics
Here you need to enter your new account information for your website in the appropriate boxes.
After you enter the necessary information, you will need to configure your data sharing settings, the options for which will be right below.
After this step, simply click on the blue Get Tracking ID button and the next thing you need to do is agree to the Google Analytics terms and conditions, for which you will get a pop up window after clicking on the button.
Step 2: Add tracking code to any website
Once you agree to the terms and conditions, you will arrive at the next page where you will need to click on the Admin tag in order to get to your tracking code. On the Admin tab, you need to go to the ACCOUNT column and choose your account from the drop-down menu. After that, go to the PROPERTY column, choose a property from the drop-down menu and go to Tracking Info > Tracking Code.
Your tracking code needs to be installed on every page on your website that you want to track in order for Google Analytics to be able to measure and report the activity on your website. The installation of the code depends on the type of website you have and what CMS platform you are using.
For instance, if you have a WordPress website, you can use MonsterInsights, which is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and it will enable you to easily install your tracking code on any page that you want.
On the other hand, if your website is built with HTML files, you can add your tracking code to the source code of your every website page with the use of an online HTML Editor or a text editor program, such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac). You can install your tracking code by adding it before the </head> tag on every page you want to track.
After you have edited the code in the text editor program, you need to upload the coded files to your site’s pages with the use of an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program, such as SmartFTP or FileZilla, for instance. However, you need to know basic HTML in order to be able to use FTP.
Step 3: Add tracking code to a WordPress website
Google Analytics code can be installed to your WordPress site by following one of the next two methods.
Method 1: Adding the Google Analytics Code Manually
Following the next steps requires basic knowledge of WordPress and how it uses templates in order to manage content.
Step 1
Once you have copied the tracking code supplied by Google Analytics, you will need to log into your website, through wp-admin, in order to access the Dashboard.
Mouse over the Appearance tab in the left menu bar and select Editor, just like in picture below.
Step 2
Once you have opened the Edit Themes page, you will have to take a look at the Templates section of the page which is located on the right side of the screen. You are looking for a file named “header.php”. In order to speed things up, you can press “CTRL + F” and search for this file name. Check the picture below. When you find it, click on it.
Step 3
After you click on “header.php”, the Theme Editor will open it and allow you to edit it. You need to look for the html tag </head>. In order to quickly find it press “CTRL + F” and search for “</head>”, just like in the picture below.
Click in front of this tag, press Enter, and paste the Tracking Code right above it.
Step 4
After you have pasted the code, click on the “Update File” button, located just below the file editing area.
Step 5
In order to check that you have done things right, you have to go back to the Tab where you have Google Analytics opened. Give it a couple of minutes and then refresh it to see if your Google Analytic account is receiving data. If there is no data, you can force the test by clicking on the “Send test traffic” button.
In order to see the reports of actual traffic data, you should try accessing the Reporting tab in Google Analytics once after 12-24 hours have passed, after you have updated your “header.php” file.
Method 2: Google Analytic WordPress Plugin – The Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights Plugin
You can add Google Analytics to your website by installing and setting up the Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights plugin. This plugin is very easy to configure, and it will allow you to start tracking website traffic immediately after configuring it.
souce: https://firstsiteguide.com/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
