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Track your website traffic with Google Analytics

June 8, 2008

Google Analytics is a tool provided free by Google that allows you to monitor visitor activity on your website. You can see where your visitors have come from, how they reached your site, where they went on your site and how long they stayed.

Google Analytics screen shot

The sheer volume of reports and depth of analysis provide plenty of scope for making informed decisions about how you can improve your site’s visibility and content.

Contrary to popular belief Google Analytics is not just for users of AdWords, although it does provide many additional features to enable the tracking of ad performance. It can be set up on any website, all you need is access to your web pages and a Google Account external link .

Getting started

For a basic setup, there are just 7 steps.

Go to the Google Analytics home page and log in.
Enter the URL of the website that you want to track.
Enter your contact information.
Read the Terms of Service, click the checkbox to accept them and click Create New Account.
Select the website profile that you just created and click Check Status to view the code snippet that must be pasted into each page that you want to track.
Paste the code just above the </body> tag on each page.
Once Google Analytics has recognised the tracking code, it will start recording. Data should be available in a day or so.

Customising the profile

That’s the simple approach. There are a number of options you can take during the setup process or later:

Edit the tracking code for multiple domains, more than one subdomain or multiple domain aliases.
Link to an AdWords account.
Create goals and funnels.
Create filters.
Grant access to other users.
Enable e-commerce transaction tracking.

Reports

Reporting is divided into 5 sections – Dashboard, Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals.

Dashboard is essentially a summarising overview of the main reports. You can configure this to add and remove reports to suit your viewing requirements. The default reports are Visitors Overview, Traffic Sources Overview, Map Overlay and Content Overview.
Visitors reporting consists of Map Overlay, New v Returning, Languages, Trending, Loyalty, Browsers, Networks and User Defined.
Traffic Sources reporting describes how visitors reached the website (e.g. direct from URL, link from another site, search engine results page, advert, etc.). The reporting consists of Direct Traffic, Referring Sites, Search Engines, All Sources, Keywords, AdWords, Campaigns and Ad Versions.
Content reporting refers to the actual pages that are visited, time on page and navigational steps taken. The reporting consists of Top Content, Content by Title, Content Drilldown, Top Landing Pages, Top Exit Pages and Site Overlay.
Goals reporting refers to pages that have been set up as those which a visitor reaches when a specific action (such as making a purchase, registering, requesting more information, etc.) has occurred. The reporting consists of Total Conversions, Conversion Rate, Abandoned Funnels, Goal Value and Funnel Visualization.

Filed in: Pay Per Click, Search Engine Optimisation