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Complete Guide to Getting Started with Google Analytics
These days, running a web project without tracking your visitor statistics is unheard of. Google provides an awesome analytics program free of charge called Google Analytics If you fall into the experienced web master category, chances are you already use Google Analytics to track information about your visitors. If you are new to the game or need to buff up on your Google Analytics knowledge, then this info is for you!
Setup
Before you start, you want to make sure you have your website up and running with access to edit the code so you can install analytics.
Great! Now head over to Google Analytics and sign up for your analytics account. After you sign up you will go through a sign up wizard which will hold your hand through a few very personal questions. The last step will spit out your tracking code, this is where we get our hands dirty.
Grab your tracking code and slap that sucker as the last item in the <head> tag of your site. If your using some sort of blog software or content management system, chances are you won’t have to add code to ever page manually. If you are tracking your small site which you made page by page, then you will need to add the code to each page. The end result regardless of how your site is put together is that you need this tracking code on every page of the site.
I am going to guess there are quite a few of you out there wanting to track your WordPress blog with Google Analytics. You can insert the tracking code into your header manually, or use a program that I recommend called Google Analyticator. This plugin makes it easy to add your tracking code as well as some cool features like disabling tracking of admins.
Lastly, take a look at your website’s source code and make sure that tracking code is in there. Once everything looks peachy, head to your analytics dashboard. On the analytics home, click the ‘edit’ button in the actions column. This is your profile settings for your website. Click on the check status button in the top right.
This should find your newly installed tracking code install and start collecting data!
Profile Settings
The profile settings are where you set up how your data is collected. On the analytics home, click the ‘edit’ button in the actions column.
This section is very straight forward and most of the information should be set up from when you registered. You will want to pay attention to the last few items like the e-commerce option, site search, and AdSense tracking. If you need to set any of these up, or change any of the information in this section, use the edit button in the top right of the panel.
Analytics allows you to track up to 20 goals – 4 sets of 5 goals. Goals allow you to track conversions on your site. Each site will have a different definition of a conversion. For instance if your an e-commerce site, you would want to track purchases, while if you are running an informational site, you may want to track how many people stay for a specified length of time
The 3 types of goals you have available to start tracking are: URL Destination, Time on Site, and Pages Per Visit. Time on Site and Pages/Visit are very self explanatory, while URL Destination takes more work.
Setting up a URL Destination Goal:
Firstly select a match type. Each match type is defined as follows:
Exact Match: An exact match is a match on every exact character in your URL without exception from beginning to end. Use this when your URLs for your site are easy to read and do not vary.
i.e. – Entering /checkout.php will track www.url.com/checkout.php and nothing else.
Head Match: A head match matches identical characters starting from the beginning of the string up to and including the last character in the string you specify. Use this option when your page URLs are generally unvarying but when they include additional parameters at the end that you want to exclude.
i.e. – Entering /checkout.php?step=1 will track both www.url.com/checkout.php?step=1 as well as www.url.com/checkout.php?step=1&userid=12345 etc.
Regular Expression: A regular expression uses special characters to enable wildcard and flexible matching. This is useful when the stem, trailing parameters, or both, can vary in the URLs for the same website page.
i.e. – Entering /checkout.php?step=1 will track all subdomains containing /checkout.php?step=1 in the url. It would track home.url.com/checkout.php?step=1 as well as external.url.com/checkout.php?step=1&user=1234
Set up your Goal Funnel
If you wish to define what pages users must or do visit on the way to your goal page, then use the Goal Funnel. Include all the pages you wish to track in this funnel and for each step select if it is required or not. For instance, if you are tracking your checkout process, you would want to require all steps, while if you were checking if visitors who landed on your destination page had first stopped by your contact page, then you wouldn’t need to require the contact page.
If you have more questions, complete information on goals can be found here.
Filters allow you to specify information you wish to have analytics track/exclude. The predefined filters are very straight forward and allow you to include or exclude traffic from specific domains or ip addresses and traffic to sub-directories. Custom filters can be set up to provide advanced filtering. More information on custom filters for analytics can be found here.
Chances are that you won’t need to change anything here initially, but possibly in the long term.
You can allow other users to access your accounts if you wish. All you need is the email of the account (the email has to be signed up as a Google account) you wish to grant access to administrate, or simply view the account.
Campaigns/Link Tracking
A very common use for analytics is tracking your inbound links. i.e. You may want to track users who click on links from marketing emails you send out, or your PPC ads. In order to track links pointing to pages on your site you need to tag your urls with tracking tags. Google makes this very easy to do with their URL Builder – I suggest you bookmark this if you will be tracking links often, it comes in very handy.
An example url for Netmospherics might look like this: http://www.netmospherics.com/email-landing/?utm_source=emailnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=monthlynewsletter
The bold portion of the url is the tracking code which can be appended on other urls to track them as well. For instance if this was an email with multiple links, I would add the tracking code to each link url.
Each url requires a campaign variable which will create a campaign for you to track your link statistics. Your campaigns show up in the dashboard which we will go over next.
Dashboard
Great, analytics is now collecting all kinds of juicy information about your visitors that can help you improve your site! But wait… where do you get to see the fancy graphs and charts showing your exploding web traffic? The answer is in the dashboard. Access the dashboard for your site through the View report link on the overview page:
While the dashboard has the flexibility to display all kinds of information, I will give you the basics and a summary of each section and the basics of the function that will give you a good understanding of the panel and provide you a basic knowledge to build on.
Dashboard Basics
Export/Email
Export allows you to save the current data to a file on your computer. You can export data to .pdf, .csv, .xml, or .tsv (available file types depend on the type of information in your report)
Email allows you to send a report (in .pdf format) in a message to an email that you specify.
Add to Dashboard adds your current view to the dashboard section (the first page you see when clicking View reports) for easy access.
Visualize allows you to display the current data in motion charts.
Date Range
You will commonly edit the range of data displayed which is defaulted to the past month. This section is fairly straight forward, with one advanced feature. You can compare your current date range to a range from the past which will come in very handy.
Filter/Advanced Filter
The filter allows you to exclude or include data strings when viewing keyword or url data.
The advanced filter lets you add multiple filters to the current view.
Dashboard Sections
The dashboard gives you a customizable overview of data you wish to see. By default it displays information site visitors, visits, and content. See above section on how to add any report to your dashboard.
Find information about your visitors from location, browser information, time on your site, bounce rate and more. Use this information to customize the design and presentation of your pages to present your site the best you can for your type of visitor.
Important Sub-Sections:
-Map Overlay
-Visitor Trending
-Browser Capabilities
This section gives you all kinds of information about how users are arriving at your site. From entrance keywords, search engine entrances to referring sites. This information is priceless for gaining insight into where your site is being linked from. SEO’s will spend lots of time making this information work for them.
Important Sub-Sections:
Really all the sub-sections are important in this section, but pay attention to the following:
-Campaigns (this is where the information from your tracking urls shows up)
-Adwords (if you use adwords)
This section will give you all kinds of insight into how users see your content. From what pages people are looking at, how they got there, and where they left the site from, this information can be very helpful. Finding people are leaving on blog posts? Have you thought about adding a related posts section? This section can help you take your site to the next level of usability!
Important Sub-Sections:
-Top Content
-Top Landing Pages
-Top Exit Pages
-Site Overlay (displays an overlay of your site showing where people are clicking)
-Site Search, Adsense, & Event Tracking (if they are installed)
If you don’t have any goals set up, this section will be disabled. This section displays important things like conversions, conversion rate, and funnel visualizations.
Important Sub-Sections:
If you have goals & funnels set up, all the sub-sections are important for you.
Conclusion
After as little as a month, you will no doubt see how powerful and useful Google Analytics can be for your web project.