How to add Google Analytics to a website
Google Analytics can be a very useful tool for any business. Its free, it’s easy to set up and it’s easy to use. Once you have Google analytics setup on your website it can provide you with very useful data that you can use to help grow your business. This data can give insight into how people are finding you online and what people are looking for on your website. It can tell you the location visitors are accessing your website from, their age, gender, the device they are using and many other elements.
In this post I will show you how to add google analytics to your website.
Steps
- You will be presented with the following log on screen
If you already have a google account (gmail account) use it to log in otherwise click the create account link.
- Once you have signed in to your Google account, click Access Google Analytics and then click sign up or if you see a start measuring button click on that.
- Fill in your account name.Then scroll down and click Next.
- Select the Web option then scroll down and click Next.
Then scroll down and click Next.
Fill in your Account Name, Website Name, Website URL, and select an Industry Category and Reporting Time Zone.
Scroll down and click Create
- Under Data Sharing Options, check the boxes next to the options that you want.
- Read the Terms of Service Agreement and accept them if you are happy.
- Click ok on any pop up that appear.
- You should then be directed to an admin page and your tracking code will be on this page.
- Once you are in the admin area look for the Tracking info link and click on it.
- Then click on tracking code.
- You should see a section similar to the image below
- The code you see here will need to be added to the head section of your website.
- Copy the code in the box.
- Now you need to go to your website and inset this code.
- The WebMe website is built using WordPress and the theme we use provides an area to add code to the head of our website. If your site is built using WordPress or some other CMS your theme may offer something similar. Whatever way you add this code to your website, it needs to be in the head of each page that you want to collect data from.
- To add this code to the WebMe website I log into the WordPress dashboard and go to Appearances > Customise
- From there I click the code link.
- Then I click the Head Code link.
- I am then presented with an area to paste code. Any code inserted here will be added to the head of each page on the website.
- This is where I past my Google Analytics code.
- The code is now added to my website so I can now go back to the Google Analytics dashboard and click the home Icon in the left menu.
- The dashboard will probably show 0 users which is normal.
It can take up to 24 hours for data to populate so check back again tomorrow. If when you check again it is still saying 0, then browse to the home page of your website and then check your dashboard. The active users right now section should say 1. If it does, then you know google analytics is working on your site.
- That’s it. You should now be able to view traffic data for your website. Leave a comment below if you found this helpful or if you need someone to implement Google Analytics on your website then we would be happy to help out.
Would you not send test traffic to the site? Surely that would prove in the real time section that you’ve installed it correctly
Hi Joseph,
Yes, you could try that but sometimes it does not display any data for the first 12 to 24 hours. If you check aback after 24 hours,send traffic to the site and there still is no data then you know for sure that you have an issue.
Perfect! I am going to use this as my template for setup on new projects! Thanks for your work on this!