Installing Google Analytics

29 10 2007

Tracking your visitors is very important. If you don’t know who is visiting your site, where is coming from or what are your most popular pages then you are not able to improve your website. What is even worse, you don’t know if a change on your website has a positive or negative impact on your traffic. There are various options available for website owners, from free to commercial. For a long time I have been using commercial software, but it didn’t give me information I needed. And then I found Google Analytics.

Google wants you to attract more of the traffic you are looking for, and help you turn more visitors into customers.

Use Google Analytics to learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site. Make informed site design improvements, drive targeted traffic, and increase your conversions and profits.

Google Analytics is a free tracking tool (though some argue about it and say it’s an exchange deal – you let them know how big is your site, they let you use their software). Installation process is quite simple. You need to go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and set up a Google account, or if you have a Google account just sign in and Google will create Analytics service for you.

The next step is to add website profile. Google will show you tracking code. All you need to do is to copy this code into your website footer (I hope you do use templates). After Google verifies placement of tracking code you are ready to go. Come back next day and check out what it was able to track. If you see no data, it means you did something wrong.

The best thing about Google Analytics is that you place just one piece of code and it detects which pages on your site are the most popular. This is something not every commercial soft offers. You can easily find out that ie. “your game description page” is the most popular page on your website and what’s more – you can find out how people go to this page (search engine traffic, referrals, direct entries, etc.).

Setting up Google Analytics is almost done. The important step is to set up goals. This will be covered in the next post.



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