You’ve got a website and you may even be blogging. You want people to see it and you want to know who, when and how people are seeing it. This is useful to you so you can be more strategic with your content. Obviously, you want to increase the traffic and therefore bookings through your site with the aim of creating income from these site users, but this can seem like a scary task when you have little to no information about who is on your site and what content they are viewing.
What is this ‘Google Analytics’ thing people keep on talking about? And why is it useful to me and my business?
Google Analytics is a free tool available from Google that allows website owners to track the website traffic on their sites and glean some useful information about your site visitors. It collects data on 75% of all websites in the world – that’s crazy. There is a lot of information available to you when you log in to Google Analytics. It can easily become overwhelming but you’ll find that there are large sections of Google Analytics that you don’t actually need to pay *such* close attention to and we’re here to help you. This is where Google Analytics becomes your new best friend forever because as a site owner it allows you to answer these five important questions about your audience:
- How many people are visiting your website?
- What are people visiting on your site?
- When do people visit?
- How do people find you?
- How do your viewers interact with content on your site?
It’s not surprising there’s a whole lot of fear out there about Google Analytics, because logging in can feel like a minefield, however, have no fear because Google Analytics doesn’t need to be scary. I’m going to break it down for you into some easy to digest, bite-sized chunks!
How to setup Google Analytics for your website
- Here’s the link to Google Analytics guide and below you’ll gather more detail / what each step means
- Create or sign in to your Analytics account:
- Go to google.com/analytics
- Do one of the following:
- To create an account, click Start for free.
- To sign in to your account, Click Sign in to Analytics.
- You’ll see “Create a Google Analytics 4 property to measure your web and/or app data.” and a box to add the name of your property – just add the name of your website. As of 2021, UA (the usual Google Analytics that most people used, has changed to Google Analytics 4
- Change “Reporting time zone” to your local timezone
- Change “Currency” to British Pound
- Click Next
- Select Business size
- Under “How do you intend to use Google Analytics with your business? (Check all that apply)”, tick them all
- Click Create
- You should be given the Property ID (if you cannot see this, click Admin in bottom left corner, go to Property Settings)
If you already have Google Analytics installed and want to switch to the GA4 from the old Universal Analytics
Google have provided this article to support you with that.
WordPress users:
Check under your WordPress theme > Theme Options to see if there is an area where you can add your Google Analytics code.
If you aren’t sure, then google the name of your WordPress theme + install Google Analytics and you’ll see support articles guiding you through. (Oh how I wish it was the same for everyone!)
You can add a plugin like “GA Google Analytics” to your WordPress website, go to Plugin Settings once installed and activated, select “Global Site Tag” and add the tracking number in the box provided.
Squarespace users:
Log into your Squarespace website.
Head to Settings > Advanced > Code Injection > Header.
This is where you add the new G- code.
Click Save.
Wix users (as of March 2021)
See you over there!
Maddy
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