How to Install & Use Google Analytics?

What is Google Analytics?

Hello! People often ask me, what the Google Analytics is and how to install and use it.

Google Analytics is the world’s most popular toolkit for tracking your website analytics and stats.

It’s owned by Google as you can judge from its name, and it used to be an independent business, but later on Google acquired it and they’ve been with Google for around 10 years. Actually, Google as the company has helped this system become the world’s most popular tracking and statistics toolkit.

With Google Analytics you can get all kinds of data on your website, you can see how many visitors you’ve had during the certain period of time, you can see where they came from, which pages of your website they have visited, you can even see which links or buttons they’ve clicked on this or that page.

So, in the right hands Google Analytics provides you with an endless set of possibilities in terms of tracking the website data.

All of the online businesses that I’ve ever seen use Google Analytics and I think you should be using it too.

Installing Google Analytics

Installing Google Analytics on your website is pretty easy.

You’ll first have to create the account – if you already have Google Account you may use it for the Google Analytics account – then you can get the tracking code from within that account.

Tracking code is something that makes the Google Analytics magic possible, you have to integrate it on your website and this is how the connection is built between your website and Google Analytics interface.

Installing the tracking code is probably the most hardest part in this process, because you have to make sure the tracking code is present on all pages of your website.

If you are using some CMS software for your website, there are tools that allow you to easily integrate the tracking code all over this website. For example, there are WordPress plugins that help you to do it.

If you’re running a simple HTML website with no CMS whatsoever, it may be hard for you to integrate Google Analytics, but still it’s possible and moreover it is as well worth it.

Using Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics is even easier than that.

For example, if you’re a complete beginner with Google Analytics and you’ve never heard of it or used it, here’s a couple of priceless pieces of information that you may get from Google Analytics account about your website.

Traffic sources

Traffic sources will allow you to see which sources drove how many people to your website.

For example, you may see that from organic Google search you get 500 visitors a month, and from paid search Ad you get 200 visitors a month, and from your partners, or blogs, or other places you have your links or banners on, you have received this many visitors. It is very valuable for people, who use advertising or who wants to see how their traffic evolves in terms of resources, or how they’re doing in terms of search engine optimization, because the traffic that you get from the Google search is obviously the direct response to your SEO efforts.

You can access it from the "Acquisition" tab from the main Analytics menu, then inside of that section you choose the “All Traffic” item and then “Source Medium” item.

This will show you the complete list of the traffic sources that you have at that moment.

Plus, don’t forget that you may play with the period – you may see these stats for the month, for the last week, for all time, etc.

Pages statistics

The second valuable section is the Pages Statistics. It will help you to see which pages are more popular on your website and which are less, on which pages people spend more time.

You can access it from the “Behavior” section – it is also available in the main Analytics menu – then choose “Site Content” item, and then proceed to “All Pages” item.

That will show you the complete list of the pages that received the traffic within the period of time chosen by you in the top of Google Analytics interface.

There is a lot more to Google Analytics than this, there are even courses from Google, teaching you how to use Analytics more efficiently, and I highly encourage you to sign up for these courses.

They have a lot of valuable information, not only about statistics and dynamics of your traffic.

This information actually helps you to plan your business development and plan your strategy for the coming months or years, so it’s really useful for every business, and you should definitely be using it.

I hope this answers your question about Google Analytics.

I will see you on next episodes.

Take care. Bye-bye!