Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It's the most widely used website statistics service.
Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
To get started, click on the “Access Google Analytics” button on the main site to sign up. You’ll need to have either a Google email address or an AdWords account that you tie to the Analytics information. Once you’ve logged in with your account, you’ll be walked through the basic information for setting up your site with Analytics. The tool can be used for either a website or a mobile app, so when you first start setting up a new account, make sure that you’ve got “website” selected for the tracking that you want. You’ll have the option to pick between two sets of features. Classic Analytics is the more basic, with basic features, event tracking, AdWords account linking, and custom variables. Google is also developing Universal Analytics, which is currently available in beta. This service includes custom dimensions and metrics, data syncing online and offline, multi-platform tracking, simple configuration controls, and certain new feature releases. For enterprise-level companies, there is a third choice. Google Analytics Premium will give your entire team a higher degree of support, security, and power for an annual flat fee. At the end of the account creation, you’ll have three options for data sharing settings. Google Analytics will determine what degree the company will make use of the information from your site. You can opt to only share your website data across other Google products, to share it anonymously with Google and others for bench-marking purposes, or to share it with account specialists at Google to get their insights on your performance. After you complete the signup information, you’ll receive the tracking code from Google that monitors visits to your site. Implementing this requires access to the source code of your site and familiarity with HTML coding, so it might be worthwhile to have a developer on hand when you’re ready to take this step. You can access the tracking code from the Admin tab of the top menu bar once you’ve signed into your Google Analytics account. Use the drop downs for Account and Property to select the exact website you’re working on. Then click on “Tracking Info.” This will bring up a box with some lines of JavaScript. Copy all of the code from that box; it should begin with script and end with script. Paste it all into the code immediately before the last head tag for each web page where you want to collect data. This code is unique to that specific property, so if you’re managing multiple domains, double-check that you have the correct one selected. Also, if you have chosen to use Universal Analytics, you’ll have more advanced configurations for your tracking code. These instructions are for a basic setup, although you’ll have the ability to customize your code to gather other information that’s not covered in the automatic tracking. Google offers several tracking functions to get more out of your analytics. For instance, you can customize your tracking code to gather intel on links that lead to downloadable files, or set up Ecommerce tracking.
You can view how to setup google analytics on your website at the following link: