Do you want to know how to add your website to Google Analytics? In this article, I’ll explain what Google Analytics is, how it works and how to add your website to receive reports.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that you can use to track and analyze the performance of your website or app. You have access to a variety of statistics and reports on website traffic and user behaviour using Google Analytics. Anyone with a Google account can access the platform, and there are both paid and free versions.

It provides a simple, free method for monitoring and analyzing website visitors. Even if you receive thousands or even millions of visitors each month, if you don’t know anything about them, their presence is essentially pointless. Google Analytics can assist you in getting the most out of visitors and even converting them into customers thanks to its powerful web analytics and reporting capabilities.

Google Analytics offers important insights into how your website is working and what you can do to reach your goals in addition to tracking the number of visitors. You may monitor everything, including the amount of traffic your website receives, its source, and the behaviour of its users.

How does Google Analytics Work?

You must include a small amount of JavaScript code on your website’s pages in order to track your website using Google Analytics.

When a user accesses a page that contains this code snippet, the code starts recording data and sends it to Google Analytics using a JavaScript file. The data will populate the reports in Google Analytics once it has gathered sufficient information from your website.

Using configurable reports, Google Analytics may track and display information such as user counts, bounce rates, typical session lengths, sessions by channel, page visits, goal completions, and more. To collect visitor data, the page tag acts as a web bug or web beacon. However, because the system depends on cookies, it cannot gather information from users who have disabled cookies.

Benefits of Google Analytics

Real-time statistics

The “real-time” tab is one of the first tabs in Google Analytics. You may view current information about your website on this tab. It comprises a digital read of the number of people visiting your website at any given moment, the proportion of those users seeing it on a desktop computer, and the proportion using a mobile device.

The number of website page views per minute and per second, the top referring websites (websites that mention your website), the top active pages, and the top geographical places where your website is seen are also all visible.

Real-time statistics assist you to understand user activity and provide you with a basic understanding of site traffic. Items like:

• the typical time of day that customers visit your website users’ numbers fluctuate over time
• Which traffic source should you prioritize—is it primarily paid, referral, or organic?
• How frequently do users convert, download a guide, sign up for a subscription, or accomplish any other objective you establish?

Understanding your Audience

It’s really helpful to know as much as you can about your audience in order to better understand how to service and target them. Google Analytics makes this data available, including the number of visitors to your website, the number of sessions each user completes, the number of pages viewed during a session, and the average session length.

Charts showing the proportion of new vs. returning visitors to your site and how traffic changes over time are also available under the audience tab. Additionally, Google Analytics offers audience demographics to aid in a more thorough understanding of your website visitors. You get to see information like:

• Who Visits your Website?

This section of analytics provides information on your audience’s location, the browser they used to access your website, and other crucial details like language, screen resolution, JavaScript and Flash capability, and more.

This information is really helpful and can be used in a variety of ways. You can use the user data to inform your custom website design and ensure that your target audience will be happy with it.

• What do people do on your website?

You can monitor the user’s journey across your website, their time spent there, and the bounce rate (the per cent of users who exit your site on the first visit). You may use this data to lower your bounce rate and raise your page views.

• How do visitors find your website?

You can see in this portion of the analytics where the users came from. Do they employ search engines, direct connections, or links from other websites as referrals for instance?

Additionally, it displays the percentage of visitors that originated from each of these sources. You can see a breakdown of each of these categories in Google Analytics. If so, it will display the search engine that brought you the most visitors, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Manage Ads

PPC (Pay per click) advertisements are a fantastic way to increase website traffic, but without an analytics tool, it can be challenging to monitor the outcomes.

You can track and manage your Google Ads account in one location with Google Analytics. The number of clicks on each ad, the cost of each campaign, the cost per click, and other information will all be available to you. Monitoring your PPC advertising enables you to identify what is effective and ultimately saves you money.

Proper Understanding of Behaviour Metrics

You may find information on all things site content in the behaviour tab of your Google Analytics platform. You may view a list of all the pages on your website, the most popular ones, and the volume of traffic they receive over time. Additionally, you may enter a specific URL from your website to view statistics for that page.

Sessions, new users, bounce rate, average session duration, and page conversion rate are some of the details shown in the behaviours tab. You may view your site speed, metrics for the last page a person visited before leaving the site, and more from this tab.

Better Tracking of Conversions (Goals)

Whatever you view as a conversion on your website might serve as the basis for goals. If your website is an e-commerce one, you may classify a goal as a purchase. If you run a bakery, you might view objective achievement as submitting a quote form. Any type of action you wish to use as a goal can be one.

Other goal suggestions include completing contact forms, downloading guides, signing up for webinars, or subscribing to newsletters.

You may learn more about your goals, how many of them were achieved, their monetary value, and more by using the Google Analytics’ conversions tab. Understanding objective completions is potentially one of the most significant aspects of any marketing strategy.

Some Google Analytics Terms

Property: the website or mobile app you want to track

Channel/Traffic source: indicates the source of your traffic, such as referrals or links from other sites, search engines, social media, and emails.

Conversion: visits that become customers or potential customers

Tracking ID: a unique code added to your site that allows Google Analytics to track it

Session duration: how long visitors spend on your site.

Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who viewed only a single page. These visitors only triggered a single request to the Google Analytics server.

Pages per session: The average number of page views per session.

Goal completions: The number of times visitors complete a specified, desirable action. This is also known as a conversion.

Landing page: the first page a visitor sees when visiting your website.

Event: specific visitor behaviour, such as when a visitor clicks on an advertisement, watches or stops watching a video, downloads a file, and so on

Organic search: visitors who visit your site from a link on a search results page

Keyword: reveals the search terms that visitors used to discover your website on a search engine This report can be found on the Behavior tab, under Site Search.

Average session duration: How long on average each visitor stays on the site.

Property: the website or mobile app you want to track

Lifetime Value: studies follow visitors from their first visit to conversions, return visits, future purchases, and beyond. This might assist you in determining what converted these visitors into customers and what kept them coming back so that you can make changes.

How to Sign Up with Google Analytics

Sign Up

• To begin, go to the Google Analytics website and sign up. Simply go to the website and select the ‘Get started today’ option.
• You will then be prompted to sign in using your Google account. If you already have a Google or Gmail account, you can sign in with that. Otherwise, you can set up a Google account for yourself.
• When you sign in with your Gmail account, you’ll see a welcome screen. This is where you will link your Gmail account to Google Analytics. Press the ‘Start measuring’ button.
• You’ll be required to provide your account name. You can choose anything similar to your company name since this name will only be used internally.
• Google Analytics will also display choices for data sharing across many accounts. You have control over sharing your Google Analytics data thanks to these settings. You can proceed to the following step while maintaining the default settings.
• You need to establish a Google Analytics property on the following screen.

Google released Google Analytics 4, or GA4, a new version of the software. The most recent version records both your website and your mobile apps under one account. Additionally, you get additional metrics, features, and a new report interface.

• Fill in the following information on the Property Setup screen:
  Property Name: Enter a name for your property, such as the title of your website.
  Reporting Time Zone: Select the timezone in which you wish your website’s reporting to take place.
  Currency: Select the currency of the location in which you regularly operate.

• On the next screen, fill in your business information
• Next, scroll down and choose how you want to utilize Google Analytics in your business, such as measuring engagement, optimizing advertising costs, increasing conversions, and so on.

You can select multiple options or all of the available options that fit your requirements. When you’re finished, just click the ‘Create’ button.

• Once you click on the Create button, a popup window will open with Google Analytics terms of service agreement.
• Click the checkbox for ‘I also accept the Data Processing Terms as required by GDPR’ and then click the ‘I Accept’ button
• Following that, you’ll see a popup with options for which Google Analytics communication emails you’d like to receive. Tick the boxes next to the updates you want to receive before clicking the ‘Save’ button.

Create Stream

• Now you will be presented with your Google Analytics Webs stream options. Since we’re setting up Google Analytics for a WordPress site, go ahead and select the ‘Web’ as the platform.
• After that, you’ll need to enter your website URL and Stream name.
• Google Analytics will have an Enhanced measurement option set by default. This enables Google Analytics to track page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, file downloads, and other metrics.
• Click Create Stream

Get Measurement ID

• Following the steps in the previous step, you will be greeted with this screen, which displays your Measurement ID and the Stream URL.
• Click the copy icon next to your Measurement ID to copy it to your clipboard. Google Analytics will also show different ways to add Google Analytics code to your WordPress website under the ‘Tagging Instructions’ section.
• If you click the ‘Global site tag (gtag.js) option, you’ll see the Google Analytics tracking code.
• Copy this tracking code because depending on the option you pick below, you will need to put it on your WordPress site.

How to Set Up Google Analytics on your WordPress Site

Method 1: Using Tracking Code Manager

• Login to your WordPress dashboard
• Navigate to Plugins> Add New and search for Tracking Code Manager.
• Click on Install, wait for it to install and then click on Activate.
• You can find the Tracking Code Manager option under the Settings menu on the left panel.
• Click on the ‘Add new Tracking Code’ button to set up Google Analytics on your website.
• Type a name for the code.
• Paste the copied Global site tag code into the field provided.
• According to Google, the code is supposed to be pasted in the <head> section of your website. Therefore, for the “Position inside the code” field, choose ‘Before </head>. This means you’re telling the Tracking Code Manager to place the code before the end of the <head> section.
• In the “Where do you want to add this code?” section, select the “Standard code tracking in your WordPress” option.
• Once you select this, another field will pop up asking “In which page do you want to insert the code”. Select ‘In the whole website (pages, posts and archives)
• When the “Do you want to exclude some specific pages?” field pops up, leave both options unchecked and click Save

That is all. You have successfully installed Google Analytics on your site.

Method 2: Using the Header and Footer Plugin

• First, you will need to copy your Google Analytics tracking code (Global site tag)
• Next, Install and activate the Insert Headers and Footers plugin. Use the same procedure used above in installing the Tracking Code Manager.
• Navigate to Settings> Insert Headers and Footers page.
• Paste the Google Analytics tracking code that you copied into the ‘Scripts in headers’ section.
• Save changes to store your settings

I hope this article helped you learn what Google Analytics is and how to install it in WordPress. If you have any questions or faced any challenges while using this article to add Google Analytics to your WordPress websites, let us know in the comments!

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