Google Analytics is a free service from Google that generates detailed statistics about visitors to a website. It shows how many people visit your site, what keywords they used to find your site, how they explored it and more. With this information you can come up with ways to enhance the experiences of your visitors. If you have multiple sites, the data helps you determine which sites you should spend more time on.

Overview

Below is the Google Analytics Dashboard, which shows the number of visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site and new visits. It also has a map showing the country/state/city of each visitor.

Additional information is available on the left menu bar in Google Analytics. For example, if you click “Traffic Sources” you will be given referral sources. On this page, you can also see the specific keywords visitors used to find your site. Very helpful!

Getting started

Go to www.google.com/analytics. If you already have a Google account, log in with your existing information. If not, click “Create an account now”.

Once you have signed in, you will see a page similar to the one below. Start adding your website(s) by clicking on “Add new profile” in the top right corner. (It’s below “Day|Week|Month|Year”.)

Make sure the radio button is on “Add a Profile for a new domain”. Type your website address in the field to the right of http://. Choose your country and time zone. Click “Finish”.

Google will generate code that you need to place in the html of your site. Copy the code and paste it right before the closing head tag in the html. Upload the revised html document to your server. In Google Analytics, click “Save and Finish”.

That’s it. After 15 to 20 minutes you will have full reporting capabilities.

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