IMFA #9: Using Google Analytics

Today's topic is on web analytics, more specifically on using Google Analytics.

What is web analytics?

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. - Wikipedia

Basically, with web analytics, you'll be able to know information like the number of visitors you have on your website, where they come from, what pages they are reading, whether they are repeat visitors, and many other types of information.

Web analytics is a very useful tool to understand your website better. It's a sort of feedback that your visitors are giving to you without any effort on their part. And with that feedback, you can use it to improve your website, and get more visitors.

What do you need?

To get web analytics data, you just need a website and a web analytics software. I hope you have a website already.

There are many web analytics software out there and one of the most popular one is Google Analytics. You'll need to sign up for an account with Google before you can access their free Google Analytics services.

Go on and sign up with Google Analytics now. I'll wait.

Okay, you're back.

Steps to installing Google Analytics into your website

Implementing analytics on your website is extremely easy. In the case of Google Analytics, you just copy and paste their programming code into your website. After that, whenever your website loads, that piece of programming code will call home to Google and submit information regarding the particular visitor visiting your site at that point in time. The data you'll get is almost real time.

After you've created a Google Analytics account, you're supposed to create a property. The property is your website. If you have many websites, you can create many properties to track all of them.

1. You can create your property under the Admin link.

2. In the drop down menu, you should see Create new property link. So just create one.

I've already created mine so you see the website name there.

After your property is created, select it, when in the menu below, look for Tracking Info, expand that menu, click Tracking Code.

3. You'll then be brought to this page below:

There are three important things on this page. Look out for your Tracking ID, Tracking code and status (of data transfer).

The Tracking ID is how Google will know that data they are receiving is from your website. Your Tracking ID will be inside the tracking code. If you're using Wordpress or some other blogging software that has a Google Analytics plugin, you can just use that plugin and paste your Tracking ID there and skip the code pasting section.

4. Copy the tracking code and paste it into the template of your blog or website. You want the tracking code to be on all the pages, and by pasting it in the template page, you ensure that the tracking code will be used in all the pages.

5. Depending on your blog software, you need to either create a widget or block first. Make sure you create your widget/block can handle Javascript & HTML code because the Google Analytics tracking code is written in Javascript language.

6. After you've pasted the tracking code into the widget/block. Save, and refresh your website. That widget/block will appear on all your pages. Visit your website and right-click to show the contextual menu, then click on 'View Page Source'. Look for the tracking code. If it's there, it means the installation is successful. Now Google Analytics will take a few hours before it starts tabulating the data.

7. If the tracking code is not that. You've either pasted your code on the widget or block, or you may have forgotten to make that widget/block accept Javascript & HTML.

8. Go back to the Google Analytics property page to check the status. If you've install the tracking code properly, the status should read "Receiving Data" which means Google has already started tracking your website traffic.

What data can you expect

I'll not be analysing the data and what they mean. That's content for another article.

I'll tell you what I look out for though.

• Which countries the visitors come from
• Which website did visitors come from, e.g. through search engine or referral links
• What pages they are visiting
• What pages are the most popular in a particular month
• How much time people are spending on a particular page
• What links people are clicking on
• What keywords people are searching for on your website

Conclusion

Web analytics is a very powerful tool you can use to improve your website and use it for internet marketing.

In a separate article, I'll analyse the data and tell you what they mean and what you can do with that information.

So your task today is to go install Google Analytics. It will take just a few minutes.