Google Analytics is by far one of the most popular analytics and reporting tools that businesses use. Not only is it free, it also owes its popularity to being a Google product. Because after all, everyone wants to rank number 1 on Google. And Google Analytics shares data with you straight from the horse’s mouth, so you can see how your site is performing in Google search.
There are a lot of valuable insights you can gain from Google Analytics, including who visits your website, what your audience’s behavior is like, and what they usually search for. You can easily track and measure your search and traffic goals with Google Analytics.
But before you can make the most out of all these insights, you will need to set up Google Analytics on your website. It only takes a few easy steps to install the tool on your site.
Here’s what you need to do.
For those who don’t have one, you will need to create a Google account as a first step. When you are creating an account, you can choose between “For myself” and “To manage my business”. with the Google My Business account, you will get some business-related features that wouldn’t be available with personal accounts.
But we doubt anyone in today’s world doesn’t have a Google account already. So, if you are an existing user, simply log in to Google with your credentials.
Once your Google account is up and running, you can start setting up Google Analytics for your site. While still signed in to your Google account, go to Google Analytics. To start using Analytics, you will also need a Google Analytics account.
On the Analytics homepage, you get two options to choose from –
If you don’t have a Google Analytics account, both these options will redirect you to the same sign-up page. If you have an account though, you can directly click on “Sign in to Analytics”.
When creating a new Analytics account, you can choose the data sharing options which help you control which data you share with Google. You also need to add a new name to your Analytics account. Click “Next” to add a property.
A property in your Google Analytics account is a website or app from which you want the tool to collect analytics data. Once you are on the “Create Property” page, you will need to enter a name for the property. This could be the name of your business or anything of your choice. You also need to choose the reporting time zone and the currency that you want to see on your reports.
When you choose a time zone for reporting, Analytics will record data according to your time even if visitors are from different time zones.
Click on “Show advanced options” and turn on the “Create a Universal Analytics property” switch on the screen. Next, enter the URL of your website.
After this, you can choose to create Google Analytics 4 property and a Universal Analytics property. The Universal Analytics property only supports website measurement and does not work on apps. So, choosing both Google Analytics 4 and Universal Analytics will send your website's data to both. If you want to stick to Universal Analytics only, you can select “Create a Universal Analytics property only”.
This setting can be changed any time later.
In the next step, you just need to enter some details about your business and click “Create”. After you have agreed to all the terms of service and the Data Processing Terms, click on “Finish” to complete the process.
The reporting view of your property will give you a filtered view of the data that you want to see for that particular website or app. You may choose to view all data related to a specific region or all data except those from internal IP addresses, and so on.
Each property that you create in your Google Analytics account, generates a unique Tracking ID. To find the Tracking ID and global site tag for a property, select the property from your account. Under the property, click on “Tracking Info” and go to “Tracking Code”. The Tracking ID for your property will be displayed at the top of the page.
The global site tag appears near the bottom of the page as several lines of code in a text box. This entire code has to be copied and pasted right under the <head> tag on every page of your website. The Tracking Code allows Google Analytics to identify which web pages to derive the data from.
You can verify if the tag is working by simply visiting your website and then checking the real-time reports on Google Analytics. If the visit was registered your tag is working fine. You can also use other tools like GA checker or Google Tag Assistant to check if your tags have been applied correctly.
Your Google Analytics setup is nearly complete at this stage. If you want to configure your account, properties, or views, you can do so at this stage. You can change your user management configurations, or link your Google Ads account to your Analytics account. You can also set up goals for user actions on your website and set monetary values to those actions, so you can get an idea about your ROI.
After the setup is complete, take some time to learn and understand how Google Analytics works. With a little investment of time and effort, you will be ready to make data-driven decisions for your business, free of cost.