Google Analytics is a completley free website statistics service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. With an easy to navigate interface, Google Analytics makes it easy to track and analyze the data generated by visitors to your website giving you detailed information about referrers, traffic from search engines, keywords and much more.
To setup Google Analytics:
- Create a Google Analytics account by going to https://www.google.com/analytics/provision/signup.
- Complete the required fields including your website’s URL, account name, time zone and click “Continue”.
- Enter your contact information and click “Continue”.
- Agree to the terms and conditions and click “Create Account”.
Once you set up your Google Analytics account, you will need to enter the tracking code into your website.
Google suggest that you copy and paste the tracking code into your web page, just before the closing </head> tag on every page you want to track.
From the Google Analytics homepage, you will be able to click the account name of the tracking you have just setup to view the reports. On the main dashboard, you will see a summary of your websites traffic data. You can customize the dashboard to show whichever reports you decide you want to see on the overview just by clicking on the report you want to view from the sidebar on the left and clicking the “Add to Dashboard” button.
On the overview page, you will find the option (at the top right) to adjust the date range for the statistics it is showing. By default, it displays data for the last month, but by clickign the date range box and selecting dates on the calendar you can adjust the information displayed to whatever time frame you want to view be it daily, weekly or for a specific month etc.
Tracking your website visitors, where they come from and how they found your website is an important practice to help you understand how your website is performing and how any changes you make to your website with a view to Search Engine Optimisation may affect your traffic. Google Analyitics provides data on which keywords are bringing the most traffic to your website, which content pages are performing the best and can help you understand how your SEO campaign is developing.
Google provides a useful resource here with detailed guides on how to use all the features of Google Analytics.
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential in order to get higher ranking in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. A higher position in the search engines will drive your customer enquiries and sales.