How To get up and running with Google Analytics

For most small businesses and startups, especially those that aren't eCommerce, you can setup Google Analytics (GA) yourself without needing a web developer. Getting started is as simple as installing one piece of code across the header of your site. However, there are a few important updates you'll want to make with the settings and tracking to start collecting insightful data on your visitors so you can optimize and improve your site. Here we'll discuss those important updates to GA so you can get up and running on your own and save valuable dollars. Now that's Shrewd!

Installing Google Analytics
First, you’ll want to create your GA account under the Google Account you use for your business. You can do that here. Following the GA instructions will be straight forward and they will supply the code you need to install on your website. There is plenty of documentation out there on how to install GA on to your specific website provider; just google ‘How to install Google Analytics on [your website provider, like Weebly]’. After completing that, you’re halfway done. All that’s needed is to tweak some settings and tracking.

Google Analytic Settings
You’ll notice in the Admin portion of GA there are essentially three layers of your analytics package; Account, Property and View. Account is the top layer and there will be only one of these. Properties can synonymous to each site you run. You could have multiple properties under an account. This is beneficial for management if you run multiple sites. The view controls the data that you’ll see within a property, and again you can have multiple views under each property. At each layer, you can control several types of settings and we’ll explain the important ones in each layer to help you get up and running.

Account Level Changes

• Under settings, check “Benchmarking”. This allows you to see benchmark data against your industry that you’ll select later

Property Level Changes

• Under ‘Property settings’ make the following changes:
  • Select the closest ‘Industry Category’ to your business. This comes into play with benchmarking.
  • Turn on ‘Enable Demographics and Interest Reports’ giving you rich demo and interest data on your visitors.
  • Turn on ‘Enable Users Metric in Reporting’ for better user metrics.
  • Connect your ‘Search Console’ to get user search term data and more inside of analytics. If you don’t have a Search Console account setup, you can do that here.
• Under ‘tracking info’ > ‘Data Collection’ change the following:
  • Turn ‘Remarketing’ on to allow you to build remarketing lists in analytics to import into adwords.
  • Turn ‘Advertising Reporting Features’ on so you can see the interest and demographic reports.
• Under ‘Product Linking’, link every google product you own to analytics. Doing this allows for robust reporting and data sharing within analytics and their respective tools.

View Level Changes

• Where you see the ‘All Web Site Data’ dropdown, select ‘Create New View’ and name it ‘Filtered View’. We’ll leave the original alone as a fail safe and the ‘Filtered View’ is where you should do all your analysis.
• Under ‘View Settings’ make the following changes:
  • Change or verify your time zone.
  • Check the ‘Bot Filtering’ box to exclude fake traffic.
  • Turn on ‘Search Tracking’ if you have it, this will enable data about what your users search in the Behavior portion of analytics.
    • If your site search renders somethign like this in the URL: site.com?q=user&search, then ‘q’ is what you’d want to put in the ‘Query Parameter’.
• Under ‘Goals’, set up any that you have. Thank you pages or even time spent on site are good goals to see analyze quality traffic.
• Under ‘Filters’ you’ll want to add these two filters:
  • HostName Traffic Only - Follow these procedures. ‘Add Filter’ > Filter Type ‘Predefined’ > Include Only > Traffic to the Hostname > That contain > [your site(s)].
    • This will block most bot traffic not blocked through the checkbox above.
    • You’ll want to be careful here that you don’t block valid traffic, checking the hostname data in your unaltered filter will help here.
  • My IP - Follow these procedures. Follow these procedures. ‘Add Filter’ > Filter Type ‘Predefined’ > Exclude > Traffic from the IP addresses > That contain > [your IP].
    • Google “My IP” if you don’t know.
    • Create a filter for every IP that frequently uses the site that isn’t your users.

And that’s it! These settings will get you started towards tracking your users efficiently and learning about how they use your website. There are plenty more settings, events, etc. that work well for specific use cases, but these are all the settings that I wish came out of the box for every GA installation.

I hope you learned something from my post today. My goal is to help those shrewd small businesses succeed online. If you’d like more assistance from a fellow shrewd mind, check out my services and consider contacting me today.