One of the most important aspects of managing a website — especially when it acts as the foundation of your business online — is to evaluate the various metrics, including everything from traffic, referring sources, keywords from search engines, and bounce rates.
The best tool to help you achieve this is Google Analytics — it’s simple and easy to get started. We’ve produced a quick video to help you get started, so get started and let us know if you have any questions.
Steps to Install Google Analytics
Here’s a quick overview of the steps necessary to get Google Analytics installed
1. Visit Google Analytics
Enter www.google.com/analytics to visit Google Analytics.
2. Link Email Address to Your Analytics Account
In order to use the analytics tool, you’ll need use an email address to access it. Register for a gmail account if you haven’t already.
3. Enter Your Website Address
Use the window provided to enter your website address — it’s best to copy and paste this into the window to avoid any chance of error.
4. Copy Tracking Code Into Head or Footer
You can either copy this code into the head or the footer section of your website, but it’s recommended you place it within the footer in order to avoid overwhelming Google crawler with too much information that doesn’t have much to do with the content of your website.
5. Click Save and Finish
This will tell Google that you’ve placed the tracking code into the head or foot of your website, and they will check to make sure. If all looks well then you’re on your way to managing your metrics with one of the most powerful analytics tools available.
Video Transcription
Hello and welcome to Home Base Learning Institute’s training today. My name is Luke – I’m going to be going over how to get your website linked with Google Analytics … very simple training, anybody can do this.
Since there lots of different c-panels and back ends to deal with, we can’t show you how to install it with everyone, but we’ll show you how to do it with Joomla, which is a free content management system.
So to get started, we’re going to go to Google Analytics (google.com/analytics), and they’re going to want to you access analytics by linking an email address to their account. Most people should already have a Google account, so this process should be very easy. If you’ve ever created an email account, you should be able to do this. So once you get in to the access panel, they’re going to give you prompts where you’re going to fill in your website address. Once you fill in your website address, they’re going to hand you a tracking code – it’s written in java code, so it should be compatible with whatever html or php you’re using. It’s about ten lines long, and it’s going to give you a prompt to put this immediately before the closing tag of your head section.
So we’re going to copy this and then we’re going to go the backend of our Joomla site. We’re going to access it by going to extensions, template manager, then we’re going to click on the template we’re using to access the html, we’re going to click “edit html” … and we can stick it in the head section, but guess what, Google crawlers are going to probably find this javascript if you put it in the footer section. We highly recommend you put it in the footer section, because if you put it a lot of information in the head section, the crawlers may not ever find your meta data, such as your meta title, me description, or your keywords. So putting it in the footer, it’s going to get crawled just the same and once you do that you’ll be able to go back to Google Analytics, click save and finish, and you’ll start seeing your data collect for your website.
You’ll be able to get great information, such as your bounce rate, how many visitors you’ve gotten in any given time period, how many pages are visited per visitor, and also your traffic sources – everyone needs to know their traffic sources so they can better market their site in different areas that work as well as areas that seem to be struggling.
So if you need more help on how to utilize Google Analytics or set goals and project your marketing strategies call or click Home Base Learning Institute.
800-539-1278