7 steps to getting started with Google Analytics deals with the basics. Create your account and install the tracking code. Find out how visitors find your site, the searches, and action they take, demographics such as their location and interests, most performing and worst web pages, etc. Navigate through the GA interface and essential reports such as audience, acquisition, behavior, conversion, etc Measure your web traffic, analyze and track visitors, and how they engage? Set up goals, manage filters, and exclude internal traffic and find out the ad revenues. Work with advanced features by adding new views, tracking events and user ID, create and apply segments, etc. . Build up your campaign URL using Google’s URL builder tool. For eCommerce websites set up eCommerce tracking. All views (profiles) in GA have a dashboard by default. Google Analytics standard version is a freemium web analytics software providing valuable insights.
Unlock more features in the paid version of Google Analytics 360. Link GA to Google Adsense and Google Search Console. Below are the 7 Steps to getting started with google analytics.
Step1: Go to Google Analytics Login and set up your account & property for your website. Get the tracking code and insert it to your <head> tag on your website. You can also verify your website in Search Console using the Google Tag Manager container snippet. Next filter your own traffic from the google analytics report. Learn more by clicking the link set-up-your-account | property | install tracking code | filters
Step 2: Set up google analytics goals and a goal funnel visualization report. Read more by clicking on google-analytics-goals-and-funnels.
Step 3: What is a good bounce rate? Learn more by clicking the link ‘what-is-a-good-bounce-rate’
Step 4: Follow best practices for profiles (now views) in google analytics and use filters to modify your data. Read more about web-analytics-basics and segments & views-filters
Step 5: Use the Google Tag Manager for tracking across domains. Read more by clicking on google-tag-manager
Step 6: Use google analytics URL builder for setting up your campaigns. Read more by clicking on google-analytics-UTM-parameters
Step 7: Customize your reports and dashboards in google analytics based on your goals. Read more by clicking on google-analytics-reports & google-analytics-dashboards
Basic Google Analytics Glossary
- Visits are named sessions
- Sessions are the interactions one user takes within the time spent on your website
- Unique visitors are named users
- New visitors are people that visit your website for the first time
- Returning visitors are people that have visited your website before
- Hit is an interaction which results in data sent to the analytics
- The segment represents a group of visitors with shared behavior that allows you to find out if your content is appealing so that you can write more such content, customize the message to enhance your ad campaigns to such groups
- Entrances in google analytics are incremented on the first page view hit of a session
- The bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or a web session.
- Page views is referred to views of a total number of pages
- Pages per visit are the measure of how many pages of content a particular user views on the website.
- The dashboard in google analytics is a user interface that provides data and tools for tracking and displaying through a widget the keywords, site references, map overlay, an overview of the content, visitors and traffic
- Traffic sources are direct, referral or search engine
- Organic is search engine traffic which is earned not paid
- Paid search engine traffic is purchased via pay per click ads from search engines
- A referral is referred to traffic from sources outside of its search engine through a link or another domain
- Direct traffic is the URLs visitors type indirectly in their browsers
- CPC is the cost per click
- Content is the main part of your website which can be analyzed to find out what is working or what is not working which is listed in the Site Content reports in google analytics
- Events are independent user interactions that can be tracked from a web page.
- Goals track specific visitor interactions on websites and when performed records that as a conversion.
- Regular Expressions (regex) find URLs that match a certain description or specific patterns in a list.
Google Analytics Chrome Extensions
- Ghostery
- Google Tag Assistant
- ObservePoint
- GA Debugger
- Adobe Analytics debugger