How to Set Up Google Analytics for Your Website

Once you've registered your website (through Dynadot of course) and set up your site (we've got web hosting!), you will probably want to start marketing your website so you can get traffic and people can start reading your witty posts or buying your excellent products. And once you do start to get some traffic, you'll want to know where that traffic is coming from and that's where Google Analytics can help make your life easier.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that shows you very useful and detailed information about your website's traffic. Since it is a free service, there is no reason for you to not use it if you have a website, whether you have a personal blog or an e-commerce site. Signing up is easy, just follow the steps below to get started:

First, you'll need to set up a Google account. You may already have a Google account, but before you use your personal account to set up Google Analytics there are some things to think about. For example, if you are setting up an account for your small business, you will probably not be the only person logging in to your Google Analytics account. If you use your personal Gmail account, you will also be giving, say, your website admin access to your email, which is definitely something to think about!

Once you've set up your Google account, you can use that information to create your Google Analytics account. You'll need to enter some basic information to get started including the name of your website, your website's URL, your website's category, and your timezone. Then you'll set up an account name and decide on your data sharing settings. When you click "Get Tracking ID" a terms of service agreement will pop up that you'll need to accept.

You're in! You should be in your Google Analytics page with your Tracking ID front and center. You'll also have some website tracking options including whether to include any subdomains (i.e. www.yourdomain.com, store.yourdomain.com, etc.), additional TLDs (i.e. yourdomain.me, yourdomain.co.uk, etc.), your DoubleClick account, and whether to override tags with custom campaigns. All of these options are defaulted to "off."

Now the most important part of getting your Google Analytics set up is adding the tracking code into the code of every page you want to track. Without this code Google won't be able to track anything. If you need help, Google has some instructions on how to set up the web tracking code.

Once you have your account all set, you can use Google Analytics to track visitors from referrers including search engines, advertising, e-mail marketing, and more!

Please note that Google updates their products often, so as this post gets older these instructions may not be exact.

Post by Robyn Norgan