Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to monitor what pages of your site are the most popular, how many people are visiting your site, when they’re visiting and from where, and all kinds of other information that can help you improve your overall visitor experience—from content needs to better navigation.
This page walks you through setting up Google Analytics for your web site.
- If you have a Google account, you may already have access to Google Analytics without having to create a new account.
- If not, visit: http://www.google.com/analytics and click on the “Sign Up Now” link. Fill in the information required to create your account. Google will send you an email to verify your new account.
Adding your web site address to your new Google account is the next step in allowing Google to start tracking your visitor actions for you.
- To add your web site, log-in to your new Google account.
- Look for the “Sign Up for Google Analytics” area and click on “Sign Up.”
- Fill in the fields, clicking “Continue” when prompted until you reach the step titled “Add Tracking.”
- Make a note of the line in the code starting with ”_uacct”, including the characters in quotes which generally start with “UA-”.
- Press “Continue.”
Now you’re ready for the last step, setting up your site to communicate with your Google account. You will need to go from Google to your site and back again in this step, so open a new browser window and log-in to your Web site.
- Click on the “Statistics Manager”.
- PROVIDER: In the “Provider” drop-down field, choose “Google Analytics.”
- USERNAME: In the “Username” field, type in the characters starting with “UA-” that you noted from the “Add Tracking” page while in Google. Include all the characters within the quotation marks, such as “UA-123456-1”.
- Click the Save
icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
- To finish up, go back to the browser window displaying your Google account and press “Check Now.” You should see a message saying “Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being gathered now.” If you do, click “Done” at the bottom of the page.
- Congratulations, you’re now using Google Analytics.
Although Google immediately starts collecting data, you won’t be able to immediately see any information. So how do you view this information in the future? You can access your Google account right from your Web site Control Panel.
- Log into your site and click on the “Statistics Manager”
- Click on the “View Reports” tab.
- A new window will open taking you to the Google log-in page. Enter your Google account information to log-in. To access the reports, click on “View Reports” link. Try clicking on the links in the “Dashboard.” Each of these shows your site traffic information from different perspectives.
