Step-By-Step Beginner’s Guide To Google Analytics

New to Google Analytics?

Read on this beginner’s guide to Google Analytics to get all your answers and queries solved by the time this journey ends.

Welcome Aboard!

Introduction to Google Analytics

You may have designed an excellent website. Yet, if you’ve got no plan who is visiting your website, where they’re coming from, which pages they’re visiting, how long they are staying on your website and why and when they’re leaving your site, moreover which pages are your hottest ones(attracting great traffic and count of website visitors you have converted), you may be wasting tons of cash and energy on targeting the incorrect kind of audience.

You need to grasp the answers to those necessary queries so about be ready to optimize your web site and build it in an effective manner.

This is precisely where Google Analytics will be of great comfort because it will ultimately help you in observing your website traffic. Hence, you’ll be able to gain knowledge and improve your site’s performance and guarantee your conversion rates keep increasing.

Google Analytics, a web analytics tool, designed by Google. Google believes in making life better for all its customers, be it the service holders or just site browsers. The triggering thought to your mind now must be “we are already working well with our site’s “what’s the need for analysis then and why google analytics in particular?”

We’ll try to solve all your doubts and reason all your queries in the further sections.

What is the requirement for Google Analytics?

For all your online business data(blogs, articles, site content and website designs & layouts), you make market research to know what people are fond of and what they search or prefer to look for. Thus, you try to construct your site keeping in mind your target audience. But, what if after doing everything right, you still don’t get “that traffic” you thought for?

It is, no doubt, very important to plan and construct. But it is also important to keep observing what is happening and why. Google Analytics aims to give you that observation. Google Analytics analyzes your website for free. And brings you the insights for whatever is happening over your site.

When you’ll have the understanding and be aware of the happenings, then you will know when to take a step and in which direction for better growths.

The next we’ll have a look at how to create or set up the google analytics account.

Steps to get along for setting up your account and working in Google Analytics.

STEP 1. Setup Google Analytics Account

You need to log in or create an account on Google (Gmail account) to set up the account on the GA platform.

#Note: You can only log in to the Google Analytics platform through a Google account ID. You can either create a new account on Google or can use an existing Google account. Many prefer to use their Gmail accounts or IDs they use for Google Drive or Play store.

I. Create a Google Analytics account

Open the Google Analytics platform and click on the sign-up button to create the new account. Thereafter, Fill the form that appears on the Google Analytics platform.

1. Select the type you want to track – website or Mobile app
2. Enter the name for your account
3. Mention the name for your website
4. Insert your website’s URL
5. Select your industry type
6. Set the timezone
   After setting the time zone, you’ll see a few options checked and marked as recommended. These are the data sharing options. You can control(by checking or unchecking the box) with whom you want to share your data with.
7. Select the button Get Tracking ID.
   After you will click on the Get Tracking ID button, you’ll see a pop-up window opening. The window will show the Terms and Conditions Service Agreement. Accept the agreement to proceed.

II. Configure the account settings

1. Set account properties

   Properties in Google Analytics are websites, blogs, articles, etc. that you wish to track. You may have up to 50 properties to track in GA.

2. Set-up views

   Views in Google Analytics are a set of rules or specifications that marks which domain is tracked and for what purposes. For example, if you wish to track the traffic from only US visitors to your site or something similar.

   You can have multiple views on your site. But, Analytics shows only one view at a time.

III. Get your Tracking Code

If you are on this step, this means you have set up your account, properties, and views successfully. Now, get your tracking code from GA that you need to apply on each page of your website that you wish to track.

1. Go to the admin section.
2. Select Tracking Info under the Property column.
3. Click on Tracking Code option – a window like below will open that shows the tracking code. You need to copy the whole code and paste it to your websites’ pages to be tracked.

Note: In this step, you can proceed with the tracking code set-up in three ways –

1. Hiring a developer or doing it yourself(if you have a similar knowledge as a developer).
2. A little easy way — Create Tags and Triggers through your Google Tag Manager account.
3. The easiest way if you have a WordPress based website — Install and Activate the plugin to get your job done automatically.

you will also need the help of a developer.

IV. Setup Your Site Search

Setting up your site search is important. It will help you know your customer’s choices and preferences while they visit your site.

To set-up Your site search, you need to follow these steps:

1. Go to the admin section.
2. Go to Views Column and select Views Settings option. You’ll see the below window then.

3. Scroll the open window to see for the Site Search Tracking toggle button and set it ON.

4. Set site search tracking to ON mode, thereafter, enter your search query parameter in the Query Parameter Box.

5. Thereafter, press the Save button.

V. Setup Your Site Goals

The next step is to set up your goals, the reasons for all this work done so far. Setting goals will help you monitor the traffic in a better-synchronized way because you will be aware of what is happening and what you want.

To set the goals, you need to move the Goals option in view column under the admin section. The setting of goals involves three steps. Let’s learn about them.

Select the +New Goal button to add your goal. The new window will open with options to set your goals. Follow along with the steps to continue with setting goals.

1. Goal setup

Here, you have two options to proceed with –

1. Template

Here, you will have some predefined fields and configurations. You just have to select what you require.

2. Custom

Google Analytics provides you all possible freedom with your ideas and decisions. You can customize your own goal under this category.

2. Goal Description

Here, you will need to highlight the details for your goals, i.e., what are you tracking, your aim. You need to name your goal first. So that you will know what the generated reports are for.

3. Goal Details

In goal details, you are required to fill in the details for the goal you have decided. For example, if you have selected Destination as your goal then you must mention the URL address that you want to be set as your destination. You may assign a monetary value to the conversion.

There you will also see an optional tab – Funnel. If you wish to track the path from where traffic is coming, you can set the funnel for that purpose then.

Now, you are all ready with the account setup but to proceed using it, you must know the auto-generated reports. Google Analytics provides the tracking results in forms of various reports specific to your tracking purposes. Let’s learn about these reports in the next section.

STEP 2. Learning about various Types of Reports in Google Analytics.

After you are all set up with your Google Analytics account, you will see different reports. These reports will help you read your market visibility and areas where you need to improvise. For beginners, reading those reports might get a little complex or full of confusion. But we will try our best to provide you insights on how to read those reports in the next section.

• Real-Time Reports

Google Analytics has approximately 10 million monthly limits for page views per website for free users and for premium users, the limit is 1 billion. GA also provides custom deals for the business owners having over 1 billion hits per month.

The Real-Time reports in GA provide you the information about the current visitors to your site. Therefore, as the name says, you get reports in real-time. Real-time reports in GA are segmented into sections, namely, Overview, Locations, Traffic Sources, Content, Events, and Conversion.

In the Real-Time Overview report, you can see the exact number of active users on your website, how many of your website pages are being viewed per minute and per second, and a list of your top active pages, along with the number of active users per each of those pages.

To get more categorical information, you may check other Real-Time reports.

• Audience Report

To grow and sustain in any business, you need to know your audience. This reporting section will provide you with detailed reports about everything you wish to know about your site visitors. The demographic report will show the age and gender of your visitors. The interests report will show you the general interests of your visitors. The geo report depicts the location and language analysis, while the behavior report analyses the frequency of the users’ visit. Also, you can track the technology your users are using to visit your site, i.e., a desktop connection or a mobile device, etc.

• Acquisition Report

Well, you may have a strong continuity in traffic and definitely, your business will grow with it in some aspect or the other. Will you be happy in just getting the good traffic? Or will you wish to know the source of your traffic too?

This report will provide you a detailed report on how people are ending up on your site. This means you can actually classify your traffic into categories like from which channel, source, social network, etc. you are getting your most of the traffic from.

• Behavior Report

With this report in hand, you will have great control of your site content. You will be able to track your top entry and exit pages on the site. If you have site search mode ON, then you will be able to see the most searched keywords and pages over the website. You can even track your site speed to make your site run faster.

• Conversion Report

These reports allow you to take insights into why and where the conversion happened and what was the order of activities or events triggered exactly before the conversion.

The conversion report has 4 sub-reports.

1. Goal-conversion reports

If you have set your goals on Google Analytics, then this report will give you insights on how much your site is performing towards your targeted goals.

2. E-commerce reports

This report aims to generate insights into your eCommerce store performance. This report will only be active if you will have Ecommerce tracking enabled in your settings. It gives you detailed insights into your sales performance, product, and product list performance, etc. To know more about the e-commerce reports, read here.

3. Multi-channel Funnels report

To track your marketing activities and campaign, you can check out this report section.

4. Attribution reports

This report lets you assign credit for conversions to specific points on the conversion journey.

If you are here, then you must have got enough information to Google Analytics account setup and the reports it provides to get started at least.

In the next section, we will see how you can read and review the analysis reports.

STEP 3. Viewing the analysis and reporting in Google Analytics

For Google Analytics, I shall recommend you to take help of experts while you are setting up your account and other metrics. Because you may not be aware of every detail in configuration and a single wrong setup will fluctuate your results to a different dimension. And I’m sure, you will definitely not want that to happen.

To view the analysis report is no big task. If you have the basic knowledge of reading graphs then it is great for a start. But remember, you just have the basic knowledge. This wouldn’t guarantee you for the exact information that you will generate out of analysis reports. And wrong information leads to wrong decisions, and all things messed up scenario.

Therefore, consider having some expert knowledge either or hiring some analysis experts to gain the right information and at the right time.

Summary

Undoubtedly, Google Analytics is an excellent tool for measuring your site’s traffic. Also, it is efficient in providing you the right information within the time for better decisions. A quick decision with proper knowledge will ultimately drive your efforts towards results, i.e, achieving your goals and conversions, etc.

Although, if you are seeking some immediate solution and using WooCommerce, we’ve built a plugin called Analytics for WooCommerce. It is absolutely FREE to use & can help you track your analytical insights. Check out the plugin details in this small video. 

We hope this guide helped you in answering all your doubts and questions. If you still have any query in your mind, feel free to connect with us. We will love to be of any help to you. Leave your query or comments in the section below and we will get back to you ASAP!