How To Set Up Google Analytics

How to set up Google Analytics is just as important as why you need Google Analytics.

The how to set up Google Analytics is pretty simple, so first let’s look at why Google Analytics is a crucial part of your success.

You wand to pay attention to Google Analytics (GA for short) for the following 10 reasons:

It will tell you where your visitors come from:

Understanding your referral traffic is key to creating a great marketing strategy.

It will tell you where geographically your visitors come from:

Understanding where your customers are from helps you formulate marketing strategies and solutions that address their frustration points. You’ll also be able to gauge whether there is a growing potential for your products/service.

To segment your customer base:

Each one of your customers is different. They react to your website differently and they perform different actions on it. You can use GA’s Advanced Segments feature to classify your customers based on certain factors.

To check if you’re achieving ‘Goals’:

Goals on Google Analytics helps you track how much your business is progressing. You can assign a number of goals to help you track the customer’s journey based on their actions.

To create and track effective campaigns:

As a business, you’ll be constantly looking to acquire more customers. To draw attention to your business, you need to create campaigns that reach out to your customers. You also need to measure the impact these campaigns have on your them.

To learn what search terms bring in traffic:

To attract traffic you need to have visibility on Google. And to do this you need to have the right keywords and search terms embedded in your website’s content. GA allows you to see which keywords are attracting a lot of visitors. The acquisition section gives you a breakdown of each search query that is directing users to your site.

To study your competition:

GA allows you insights into competitor analysis. You can compare traffic stats with those of your competitor. See how many visitors your competitor is acquiring. You can compare them to check if your website is engaging enough to beat the competition.

To know what content “sells”:

It’s important to know which content is most popular among your audience, so that you can continue to create what is popular and amend what isn’t.

Customize Reports:

You can customize dashboard and reports to better understand your market place, audience, and performance.

It’s Free!

Setting Up Google Analytics

Create Or Sign In To Your Google Analytics Account
Setup a Property

Create Property for Google Analytics — Analystics Admin Page to setup a Property

Confirming property for Google Analytics — Select Web since you’re measuring data from your web site.

Install your Google Analytics tracking code.

Now you’ll see your unique tracking code: We now need to install Google Analytics into WordPress.

Install Google Analytics Using a Plugin

One of the easiest ways to add Google Analytics to WordPress (for both beginners and experts) is to use a plugin like Header Footer Code Manager. This is probably the easiest (and safest method) for adding a Google Analytics code to your WordPress site. Just install the plugin and add your tracking code to start tracking (as pictured below:)

Test Analytics

Return to your Tracking Code page in Google Analytics and send test traffic. If you’ve implemented your tracking code properly you should see real time traffic.

Filter Out Your IP Addresses

Create a filter to remove each of your IP addresses to help avoid “dirty” data. We don’t want to falsely report data because of our own visits to our site.