How to Install Google Analytics

Google Analytics is widely regarded as the industry standard for tracking website traffic. This powerful free tool will tell you things like:

• How many people visited your website in a given time period
• Where these visitors came from (i.e. search engines or other websites)
• Which keywords these visitors searched for when they found your website (if they found it via a search engine)
• Where these visitors were located, geographically speaking (as in country, state, city)
• What web browser your visitors were using when they viewed your site
• How long they spent on your website
• Which pages of your site they visited and for how long
• Which pages they entered and exited your site from
• How many visitors completed a "conversion" (as in did something like buy your product or fill out a form or visit a contact page - this is defined by you)

Given that Google Analytics does all this and more, and for free. I find it surprising that only 26% of the websites out there actually use Google Analytics. I figure at least some of the other 74% are small business owners who maintain their own websites and never knew they needed Google Analytics or were intimidated by the process of setting up a Google Analytics account and installing the Google Analaytics tracking script on their website.

Installing Google Analytics is actually a fairly simple process, and I dug up a couple of easy to use resources with step by step instructions:

• For those who need something you can print out and read, try the Google Analytics Installation Guide.
• For those of you who like to be shown how to do it, try this video:

 

Stay tuned or subscribe to my blog for my next post in this series , where I'll talk more about how to actually use Google Analytics!

If you need help figuring out how or where to install your tracking code, feel free to leave a comment below.