Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free website monitoring and analytics tool that lets you understand your website traffic. You can use it to find out:

• How much traffic each web page gets
• How the visitors found the page e.g. what search engine, who referred them.
• What keywords they used to find the page
• How long they spent on the page.
• What pages they visited next.
• What browsers they used i.e. Internet explorer, Firefox
• What Screen resolutions
• How many visitors were return and ho many were new
• What country they came from
• etc

It also integrates with Adwords so you use it to measure the effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns.

All you need to do is to:

• Sign up for a Google account if you don't already have one (see security note below)
• Add a website profile (you can monitor multiple sites)
• Paste a tiny bit of JavaScript on each web page above the closing </body> tag. Don't forget to include the page template!
• Verify that Google can see the tracking code.

Note: if you use it on multiple sites you will need to add a profile for each site and the JavaScript code is different for each site. Don't generate the code for one site and then use it on multiple sites.

Security Note: I would recommend using an email address that you don't publicly use (if you have one as it is more secure. You can also use a Google Gmail account and again I would create an account that I would only use with webmaster tools and analytics, Adwords or Adsense.

Setup Video

To get you started I've put together a short setup video that takes you through adding a site profile and adding the analytics code to your web page.

The Google analytics web page is http://www.google.com/analytics/

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