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Set Up A Google Analytics Account For the First Time

Tracking visitor behavior and traffic to your website is an important aspect of your overall marketing. By collecting and reviewing this data you are able to learn a lot about your market and in turn make better decisions as it relates to your marketing.

Setting up a Google Analytics Account for the First Time

Because there is a lot of ground to cover within analytics, I am going to start with the basics and probably the most important aspect of tracking – account set up.

Depending on what you are looking to track, account set up may vary slightly. For purposes of this tutorial, I will cover account set up for an ecommerce site.

What You Will Need

*To preface this tutorial, you will need to have a gmail email address or any email address thru google. It’s important to set up all your google related accounts under the same email address.

For example, Search Console, Google Analytics, AdWords for the simplest way to connect them all together. Be sure you can easily access that email account also.

Setting up the Master Account

Before setting up any analytics account, a review of all your web assets and how they are related is a worthwhile activity. When setting up analytics accounts you’ll want to start with a master account which is usually your main website. All other related sites, subdomains, apps, landing pages etc should be set up under the master account as “Properties”

The Tutorial

Part 1: Setting up the Master Account

From your google analytics account admin section you’ll want to click on:

  1. Create Account (See screenshot 1.0  below)
  2. Select what you are tracking-a website or mobile app then
  3. Enter an account name. It’s okay to have the account name and the website name be the same thing. For most this is a tad redundant but there for those who need it.

Enter website URL be sure to switch it to https if your site is running an ssl certificate.

  1. Select your industry category, country and time zone.
  2. I also recommend you select the 4 checkboxes under Data Sharing Settings
  3. Then, at the bottom of the page select Get Tracking ID.

Afterwards you’ll want to accept the Data Processing Terms and the Google Measurement Controller-Controller Data Protection Terms and click I Accept

Install the Tracking Code

Next you will be presented with your tracking code. If you are running a wordpress site, installing the tracking code is made easy with any one of a variety of plugins that will do the heavy lifting for you. After installing the plugin, and by entering your UA-XXXXXX number shown in the example below, they will add the tracking code to all pages of your site. (See Screenshot 1.1)

Part 2: Account Configuration

So you’ve successfully begun tracking your website’s traffic but unless you set up some filters and configure a few options, your data won’t be that useful. For starters you’ll want to configure views for your properties. If you are just tracking one website, you will still want to have multiple views such as:

  • Raw Data – all site visits without any filters
  • Filtered View – data that filters out your visits or any other visits from people in your organization
  • Test View – a view used for testing different configurations, goal implementations, or other tracking configurations.

The filtered view will be the used for obtaining accurate traffic data. Once you tested any changes on the test view and are certain of their accuracy, you’ll want to add them to your filtered view to start tracking. Be sure to test changes before adding them to your filtered view. Keeping your data as accurate as possible is important.

Stay tuned for Part 3 – Setting up Filters in the next lesson

 

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