Google Analytics Setup

Google Analytics tracks how many users visit your website and tells you how visitors find and interact with your site. In Google Analytics, web analytics reports about your site are provided with Google Analytics metrics and dimensions, and you can view:

  • Traffic sources, including organic search engines, paid search engines, referring sites (non search engines), social networks, microblogging services (twitter), or emails, that send visitors to your website.
  • Web pages (content) that visitors view.
  • Geographical locations in which visitors are originated from.
  • Ratios of new visitors to returning visitors that visit your site.

To view Google Analytics reports, follow this basic Google Analytics setup guide to track your website’s traffic.

Google Analytics Profiles

Google Analytics profile is a website profile that defines the rules for the reports you can view. Create a Google Analytics profile for your website.

The profile you create will be the interface to display all your Google Analytics reports. A Google Analytics account offers 2 access roles for you to control report access:

  • Administrator access: An administrator has full access to all the profiles under the same Google Analytics account and can make all the changes (including access roles, profiles, filters, goals) to the Google Analytics account. The administrator can assign access to and change access roles of other users. The person who creates the account has administrator access by default.
  • User access: A user has “view” access to reports under profiles that are assigned to him/her.

Each Google Analytics profile is assigned to track one web property (e.g. a domain, www.gordonchoi.com) or multiple web properties (e.g. a site, www.yola.com and a blog, blog.yola.com). Each profile has a unique ID in the format UA-XXXXXX-YY.

You will require to create at least one Google Analytics profile in your account.

Google Analytics Filters

Google Analytics filters can be applied to a profile for restricting data from showing up in Google Analytics reports in the profile. Create filters for your Google Analytics website profiles in one of the 2 ways:

  • Predefined filter: Exclude traffic from a domains, exclude traffic from the IP addresses, or exclude traffic to sub-directories
  • Custom filter: Exclude Pattern, include pattern, search and replace, advanced, or uppercase or lowercase

To track a single domain with sub-directories, no filter is required. Set up Google Analytics filters if your profile needs to track website traffic for:

  • Multiple sub-domains
  • Multiple domains
  • Multiple domains and sub-directories
  • Multiple domains and sub-domains

Google Analytics Conversion Goals

Google Analytics goals can track conversions for your site, including:

  • Member registrations
  • Newsletter sign-ups
  • Purchase confirmations
  • File downloads
  • Views of a page

Create conversion goals from 1 of the 3 goal types that Google Analytics offers:

  • URL Destination
  • Time on Site
  • Pages/Visit

To track keyword conversions of search traffic, Google Analytics reports keywords with conversions for SEO traffic by default. For Google Analytics to report PPC traffic including Google Adwords, Bing Adcenter, Yahoo Search Marketing and Baidu PPC, refer to the setup guides:

Google Analytics Tracking Code Snippets

Google Analytics records each visit to your site through a Javascript-based code snippet.

  • Get the asynchronous tracking code snippet from your Google Analytics account.
  • Install/Insert Google Analytics tracking code into every pages of your website. The tracking code snippet should be inserted within the header area of the HTML pages.

Customize the tracking code if your Google Analytics profile needs to track website traffic for:

  • Multiple sub-domains
  • Multiple domains
  • Multiple domains and sub-directories
  • Multiple domains and sub-domains

Google Analytics Reports

Refer to the definitions of Google Analytics metrics when viewing Google Analytics reports, including:

Visitors Reports:

  • Map Overlay
  • New vs Returning
  • Visitor Trending
  • Visitor Loyalty
  • Mobile

Traffic Sources Reports:

Content Reports:

  • Top Content
  • Content Drilldown
  • Top Landing Pages
  • In-Page Analytics / Site Overlay
  • Site Search
  • Adsense
  • Event Tracking

Goals Reports:

  • Total Conversions
  • Conversion Rate
  • Goal Verification
  • Reverse Goal Path
  • Goal Value
  • Goal Abandoned Funnels
  • Funnel Visualization

Official Google Analytics Installation Guide

Google offers this official installation guide for Google Analytics.

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