What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a very powerful but easy to use tool that tells you how many visitors your site has had, which pages they viewed and how long they stayed on your site. And that’s just for starters.
When you set up your analytics account don’t forget that it will take one or two days before there is any data in your new analytics account. So set it up a couple of days before you start to look for data to analyse.
Add Google Analytics to your website, how to set up Google Analytics
Installing Google Analytics in the Genesis Framework
You need to have a Google Analytics account, search for Google Analytics, go to the site and get a Google account and a Google Analytics account.
In Google Analytics click the Admin tab. It’s in the top right hand corner of the screen.
Click Tracking Info tab.
Scroll down and click Standard tab and choose “A single domain” radio button.
Copy the analytics code in the box below this.
If you use Genesis Framework…
In your WordPress dashboard click the Genesis Theme Settings tab.
Scroll to bottom of page and paste code in the wp_head() box. Not the footer box.
If you don’t use Genesis you’ll need a plugin to install the code Google provides.
Or you can just paste the code into your header.php file if you know what you’re doing. However do be careful because you can break your site by editing php files.
In header.php look for the closing </head> tag and paste the code Google provided just before this tag.
<head>
Code Google provided goes here…
</head>
Once again remember only do this if you know what you are doing or you could break your site.
Using your new data.
Google Analytics login
Go to the Google Analytics homepage and click the sign in link.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
If you have more than one account, select the one to use from the list.
Choose from
- Home tab, showing a general overview of activity on your site.
- Standard Reporting, showing the most useful info.
The image below shows the home tab.
That’s it, you are now logged in to Google Analytics and ready to discover all sorts of useful info about your site and your customers.
Google Analytics reports
Useful information found in your Google Analytics reports.
In the left hand side bar, click the Traffic Sources button. Then click Sources > Search > Organic.
On this page you can find…
- How many visitors your site has had on a particular day, month etc.
- How long they stayed on your site.
- How many Bounced straight off your site.
- What percentage of your visitors are new or returning visitors.
- And very importantly, you can see which keywords they used to find your site.
So, after clicking, Traffic Sources button. Then click Sources > Search > Organic.
Look for the secondary dimension box and select Visitor > City.
This shows you what search term visitors used and which city they were in. Eg. Searcher typed into Google “web design Bradford” and they were in Leeds.
Find out if your site attracts visitors using iPads or mobile phones.
In left hand sidebar click Audience > Mobile > Devices.
At the bottom of the page you will see this dialogue listing the types of devices used to view your site. If you click the camera icon you will see a pop-up image of the phone used.
Change Date Range.
Choose a different date to view data from.
- Click the down arrow next to the date.
- Check the Compare to: box.
- Put the most recent date in the top box and the earlier date in the bottom box.
(My screen capture software couldn’t make an image of this because it works on JavaScript.)
This let’s you analyse data from a particular day, month etc.
I hope this tutorial has helped you see how useful Google Analytics can be. If you want to learn more about using Analytics you can find a good tutorial on the Google site. If you want to invest a few pounds in some training I’d recommend Lynda.com video training.
Good luck and happy analysing 🙂
Google Analytics on Youtube.