To have a successful online business, you need to analyze the traffic to your website. Basically, Google Analytics is an online service that helps website owners to get all the statistics and essential analytical tools for free. It only requires having a Google account. This will be helpful for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes.
Why do you need to set up Google Analytics?
It will be simple to track the performance of your website and the insights of your visitors using Google Analytics. Through these metrics, organizations, enterprises, marketers, and website owners may learn everything about their traffic (age, nationality, gender, etc.). They may also learn which hours are the busiest, how long visitors spend on their pages, where those visitors originated from (search, social media, other websites…), and much more.
This includes numerous amazing benefits in addition to traffic analysis, such as assisting firms in determining top sources of user traffic. Also helps measure the success of social media, sponsored campaigns, and other marketing operations.
This tool also makes it simple to track goal completions (whether your aim is to generate leads, subscribers, or sales, for example) and track their customer behavior.
In short, It’s the best way to analyze the traffic to your website, improve your marketing campaigns and enhance your driving traffic strategies.
How does Google Analytics work?
As previously stated, Analytics’ function is to evaluate data from visitors to your website. This is accomplished by inserting a JavaScript page tag from your Google Account into your website’s code. When a visitor visits your website, this tag runs in his web browser, captures his data, and transmits it to one of Google’s data-collecting servers. It creates thorough statistics based on the data they receive, including the number of visitors, traffic sources, conversions, bounce rates, page visits, goal completions, and much more.
The page tag collects information about visitors. However, because the entire procedure is dependent on cookies, data from visitors who have deactivated cookies cannot be accessed.
Google Analytics feature
Furthermore, It provides several important features to assist website owners in tracking visitors’ paths within the website and how they interact with their material. These features include data visualization tools (dashboards, charts, etc.. ), integration with other Google products, and many more. It also includes data collection APIs (application programming interfaces), predictive analytics, and subset segmentation for analysis. This also includescustom reports explaining audience behavior, and many more.
You may see the Google Analytics dashboard on their official site for better performance, or you can use it as a widget or plugin for embedding onto other sites. In addition, many independent vendors show customized Google Analytics dashboards for the same objectives.
How to set up Google Analytics
To set up Google Analytics with your website or blogger and start collecting the basic data, follow these steps:
Step 1: Create or login into an Analytics account.
If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, go to google.com/analytics and select the Start for free button.
If you already have one, sign in to Analytics.
Step 2: Create a property in your Google Analytics account.
When we mention property, I mean your website, landing page, or app, the data from which you wish to collect using Google Analytics
1- Give your property a name.
Select a name for the property before proceeding (e.g. Name it with your Domain, Your Name, or anything that reflects your business).
2- Choose a reporting time zone and currency.
You must pick the reporting time zone (most importantly, your time zone) and currency (USD is strongly recommended).
This is an intelligent platform, so if your time zone observes Daylight Savings Time, the software will automatically adjust for time changes. By selecting Greenwich Mean Time, you may avoid these features.
Any time zone change may affect future data, however, the analytics servers may take a few hours to complete this change. As a result, don’t be concerned if you receive data referring to your previous time zone for a little period of time.
3- Advanced Options
After setting up the property-setup fields, scroll down and click “Show advanced options”.
4- Turn on the switch to become blue beside Create a Universal Analytics property.
5- Go down and type the website URL. Don’t forget to select HTTP or HTTPS.
6- At this point, you can choose between a Google Analytics 4 property and a Universal Analytics property only.
7- Click Next and write all the needed information about your website then click Create.
8- Accept the Analytics Terms of Service as well as the Data Processing Amendment if found, then click Finish.
Step 3: Add a Google Analytics tag to your website
At this step, you have to add an Analytics tag to your website. It is so easy, you just need access to the HTML of your website, blogger, or host (this depends on the kind of platform you use).
1- Log in to Google Analytics and search for the Javascript tracking code.
2- Go to your website and put the entire tag into the header.
Within 30 minutes, you will begin to see data.
WordPress, Hubspot, Shopify, Squarespace, and many other CMS systems often offer a section or a plugin that you can install and copy-paste your Google Analytics account ID into to set up the Analytics dashboard.
How do I configure Google Analytics in WordPress?
- To install Google Analytics on your WordPress website, follow these steps:
- Launch your website.
- Navigate to your dashboard.
- Select Appearance from the left-hand menu.
- Select Theme Editor.
- Header.php may be found on the right side of the dashboard, next to the HTML code.
- After pasting the tag after the head>, click Update File.
Congratulations, Google Analytics has been successfully connected to your WordPress, and you will begin to view data on your Analytics account within 48 hours.
Conclusion
Whether you are a company owner with a professional website or a blogger with a simple blog. You will discover that utilizing Google Analytics to measure your audience behavior and the efficacy of your marketing initiatives is really beneficial. This is accomplished in three steps: registering an account, setting up a property, and pasting your tag into your website. To get started with Google Analytics, follow the steps outlined above. If You Have Any doubts Please let me know in the comment section below.