Everyone with an online presence needs website statistics. Setting up a Google Analytics account, registering your website and linking it up is very easy if you follow my 7 steps. You will get some fantastic visitor behaviour statistics. This information will help you increase your traffic and guide you so you can make better strategic decisions in the future.
Website Statistics
When you’ve followed these easy steps, you will get data showing:
- How many visitors have been to your website
- How many ‘organic’ visitors have been on your website (after a search)
- What web pages they were looking at, including how many
- How long they spent on each webpage (we’d like it to be over 2 minutes)
- How many visitors only looked at one page (something we want to reduce)
- Much more
Note: This tutorial is for websites on WordPress but if you have your website on Wix or another slow, code-heavy website builder, have a look at their documentation on how you put the Tracking ID in the header. I don’t do Wix!
1. Setting up a Google account
If you don’t have a Google account, create one at Google.com. It’s really simple. If you have Gmail, you already have an account and can use this to create your Google Analytics account.
2. Setting up a Google Analytics account
Go to Google Analytics (you may have to sign in to Google again, even if you were before). Click on the ‘Create Account’ button and give your account a name. If you have more than one website, you may be best just using your name.
Leave the options as they are and submit.
Tell Google what you want to measure
You want statistics for your website, select this and submit.
3. Set up a property in Google Analytics
A Google Analytics property is your website. You can have a number of properties which would give you stats for each site. Just fill in the name of your business and the URL, website address, specify your business industry and make sure you select United Kingdom, then submit.
4. Google Analytics property codes
Google will give you a Tracking ID for your website stats. You need to copy this.
5. Download the GA Google Analytics plugin
Jeff Starr created this cool plugin, GA Google Analytics, which places your Tracking ID into your website. This makes things easy, instead of messing around with files in your directory.
Go to Plugins, add new and type GA Google Analytics to find the plugin. Select it, install it and activate.
6. Enter your property codes
Select the Settings option in the plugin.
Enter your Tracking ID and select Global Site Tag. Don’t forget to select the radio button for placing your code into the footer, putting into the header as Google suggests slows your website down just a little bit.
Tick the ‘Disable Tracking of Admin-level users’ so that when you see results in your stats, it’s not just from you checking the website.
Save your options.
Log back in to Google Analytics
Open Google Analytics again and log in. From the home page, select the website you want to see the stats for and click on ‘All Web Site Data’.
If you open your website in your browser, you should see some activity in the ‘Active users right now’ blue box. This tells you that it’s working. Your stats start from now.
7. Check your Website Statistics
The home page shows you the basics. You can see how many visitors (Users) have been on your website. All traffic you send from social media will show up here as well, it’s separated in one of the homepage graphs.
Organic traffic can be monitored in Acquisition, Campaigns, Organic. I’ll cover this in more detail in another post but for now, let’s get some data to look at.