Tracking Websites with Google Analytics
How to Create a Google Analytics Account
Analytics can help businesses measure the return on their social media investments. It will be difficult for entrepreneurs to measure the presence and growth of website traffic without any website analytics application. If you cannot precisely determine the effectiveness of your web marketing campaigns, your business might fail online without even knowing it. Causes of failure are also hard to discern without a verifiable data to examine.
Google Analytics has become a tool, much necessary for all social media marketers. Its capacity to calculate sales and conversions allows entrepreneurs to learn how visitors use their websites. This gives them the power to know how and why people come to visit the site and make them come back again. These features are important to analyze the efficiency of your website in attracting people to stick around and browse.
So, how do you create a Google Analytics account? Here are the steps:
First, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/.
As you don’t have an existing account, click ‘Create an account.’ You’ll be led to this page:
To sign up, fill in the details needed below:
General Information
Account name asks for your website title. Once you’ve encoded that information, put in the website URL. Choose the time zone of your target audience and select the business category that fits your work.
Data Sharing Settings
The options in this part ask you to determine how much analytics data you’re willing to share with Google and other entities.
‘Share my Google Analytics data with other Google products only’ means that you restrict data access to Google services.
‘Share my Google Analytics data anonymously with Google and others’ will let other sites access your data for benchmarking reports and aggregate trends. Google assures that the shared data will be completely unspecified and will not be tied to any individual account.
User Agreement
Select your country first before reading the terms of use. These terms should be read COMPLETELY to ensure that you understood the conditions set. After that, tick off the box that says, “Yes, I agree to the above terms and conditions.”
Click ‘Create account.’ A tracking code will be provided. Get the tracking ID located in the white box with red edges.
You’ll also need to fill out the details below:
Click ‘Save’ after you fill out all the necessary details.
Place the tracking ID on the source page of every page in your website. If you don’t know how, you can ask your web developer to do it on your behalf. Find the </body> tag using the CTRL+F function. You’ll see </body> at the very bottom of the page, near the </html> tag. If you see the urchinTracker(), utmLinker(). utmSetTrans() or utmLinkPost() above </body>, paste the Google javascript code and tracking ID above that code. If you don’t see the mentioned tags, you can insert the code above </body>.
You can now expect data to start populating your analytics account. You may have to wait for at least 24 hours before you can expect a report to study. Wait for a day and don’t click the ‘Standard Reporting’ tab yet. If you do, here’s what you’ll see:
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