Getting Started with Google Analytics

Last week we talked about Why Website Analytics are Essential to Your Online Business. Today we’re going to take a look at Google Analytics, a powerful, robust, simple, and free web analytics service offered through Google, which tracks, compiles, and generates the vital web statistics we discussed.

Today we’ll walk through the simple steps you need to take to get started, then we’ll go further in depth with Google Analytics in a few days time.

How to Set Up Google Analytics

Start by going to http://www.google.com/analytics/ Click on “Access Analytics”

and you’ll be taken to this screen:

If you already have a Google account (for any Google service, including Gmail or Adsense), just log in. If you don’t have a Google account then click on “Create an Account now”. You’ll need to sign up for one before you continue.

Once you’ve gone through the log in or sign-up process you’ll be taken through a series of steps to set up your website’s new profile, such as your website’s URL, country and timezone. Once you complete the set-up you will receive a Tracking Code.

This code needs to be copied and pasted onto every page of your website. Where you place the code is going to vary greatly depending on how your website was designed.

If your Website is NOT a WordPress site…

Google Analytics gives you clear directions that the code needs to be placed immediately before the closing </head> tag. If this doesn’t make sense to you then you’ll probably want to get some support for this part of the setup. Depending on how and where your website is set up you may be able to ask your website designer, website host, website builder customer support or other sources for help to find the location where you need to place the tracking code.

If you’re a do-it-yourself type, you need to find your source HTML site files. You will then place this tracking code on every page of your site. In some cases, you’ll only have to add it in one spot and it will automatically propagate through your entire site (yet another reason I recommend you have a WordPress site).

If your Website IS a WordPress site…

Many WordPress themes are set up for you to simply add the tracking code to the site/theme setup.

The easiest way, however, is to install one of a number of readily available (and free!) Google Analytics plugins that allow you to just pop the tracking code in an easy to find section so that it can be added throughout the site, or which in some cases will automatically link to Google to authenticate your site without any need to copy and paste the code. Simply go to your plugins page and search for Google Analytics and all available plugins will appear for you. I use the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, however there are a number of other options available.

Once Google starts receiving data, it will start collecting information that is going to help you make future decisions on the marketing and messages you set forth in your business.

How to Set Up Google Analytics Email Reports

Once we understand what analytics are and how to start collecting them, it’s easy to see how important they are in terms of researching and understanding our market. One beautiful aspect of Google Analytics is that you can “order” reports on a regular basis. You simply schedule email reports to be sent to you at the interval you determine.

I recommend setting your reports to monthly. Weekly is generally too often and can lead to overwhelm, causing you to simply do nothing as you’re swimming in a sea of data you aren’t sure how to interpret. Also, you could see variations during a single week that even out over a month or more. A small dip over a holiday could send you into an unnecessary panic when over the course of the month, your traffic may have actually grown. You also need a longer perspective to see if some blip is an aberration or a permanent state of affairs. Quarterly, on the other hand, is too long because by the time you actually look at the data and trends it might be too late to do anything about them. Monthly is just right because a new month gives you the opportunity to visit your stats, income and activities to make sure your are driving your business in the right direction.

The Dashboard

When you first log into your Google Analytics account you’ll see a list of your monitored websites. Click on whichever website you’d like to receive reports for.

Then, click ‘View Report’ to see your Dashboard for that individual website.

Email Your Reports

You can now see a little button at the top of each section that says Email. Clicking on the Email button will allow you to either email the report immediately, or schedule it for a later, recurring date. After you click it you’ll see two (or three) tabs across the top that allow you to choose how you would like to set up the report.

• Send Now – Sends you a report immediately.
• Schedule – Allows you to set up a monthly schedule.
• Add to Existing – If you have already set up other reports this option allows you to combine your new report into the original so you have only ONE monthly report by email, instead of a whole bunch of reports and emails coming in at once.

For your initial setup you’ll want to click the ‘Schedule’ tab.

You’ll notice that you can also send the report to others. You might want to use this feature to send a monthly keyword report to your writer or guest bloggers who can then use it to create new monthly content. Or you might want to schedule a monthly report on traffic sources to your virtual assistant who can use it to ping the same sites or find new, similar ones on which to promote your business.

The subject and description are fairly straightforward. This is what will appear in the email.

You can also choose a format that works best for you from multiple options such as PDF, XML, Excel, CSV & TSV.

Then you can choose between weekly, monthly or quarterly automated reports. Schedule and be worry free.

Something to note before you set up your schedule: The email report shows exactly the parameters that you have on your screen at the time you hit the Email button. So be sure you are in the right section of your reports and that you can see on the screen all the information you need. For example, say you want to get a “keywords” report sent to plan blog posts for the next month. You may get well over 500 keyword searches per month, but the default screen in Google Analytics only shows the first 10 results. So when you create your email report you need to scroll down to the very bottom of your page and make sure it is set to show 500 rows. Otherwise the report will only send you the first 10 results, which may not be very helpful.

Which Reports should I email?

The next thing you might be wondering is what kind of reports you should send yourself. There are many sections to Google Analytics, and you don’t want to send yourself everything because it will be too overwhelming. Here are the reports I suggest:

1. Dashboard Overview – This includes information on how many visitors you received, page views, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site and percentage of new visits. The dashboard also contains a few other summaries such as a Map Overlay, Traffic Sources Overview and a Content Overview. This can also be customised.
2. Traffic Sources: Referring Sites – Knowing which sites are actually sending you traffic right now is golden information. You want to use this feature to see how much more traffic you can get from the same sites and which other similar or related sites you can get traffic from as well. For this report, I set the number of rows to view at 50.
3. Traffic Sources: Keywords – Real humans are typing words into the search engines to find your site. Knowing exactly what these words are helps you write more useful content along the same lines and allows you to see where gaps in your content might exist.
4. Content by Title – This tells you the most popular pages on your website. Use this feature to make sure the popular pages are optimised, and to create new pages on the topics your visitors like the most.

You’ll be amazed at how much time you save by taking the time now to set these reports up. Months zoom by quickly and before you know it you’ve forgotten to check your stats for six months. But – with this automated setup there are absolutely no excuses for not looking at your stats every month.

In the next post in the series, we’ll go further in depth to understand the information Google Analytics provides in order to allow you to make informed decisions. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

Look forward to seeing you again soon!