After you’ve built a website, you’ll want to see how many visits you’re receiving. With Google Analytics, you can do that (and much more!) for free! Google Analytics works by giving you a little bit of web code that you install on each of your website pages. Each time someone visits your site, that code records their anonymous information and tracks it within your Analytics account.
So, in order to use Google Analytics, you need to have access to your actual web page code in order to add the tracking code. Alternatively, if you have a webmaster taking care of that kind of thing for you, you can send them the code that needs to be added - they’ll know what to do.
- Go to www.google.com/analytics
- Like all free Google tools, you’ll need a Google Account to get started. It’s free and painless - go for it.
- Once you’re in, you’ll need to set up a Website Profile. You can actually have multiple profiles if you have multiple sites that you want to track. Click “Add Website Profile” in the bottom left.
- Select “new domain” on the next page, then enter the URL of your website. Choose your time zone and country, then click Finish.
- Follow the instructions on the next page and copy the code provided. This is what you will paste onto each page in your site. If you need to send it to someone else to do this for you, paste the code into a plain text file (using Notepad) and send that file to them.
If you ever get stuck or have questions, click the Help link in the upper right. Every thing you need to know can be found there
NOTE:
If you have a blog site at Blogger.com or Wordpress.com, they have built-in analytics options for you. You don’t need to use Google Analytics.
If you host your own blog (i.e., if you’ve downloaded the software from Wordpress.org and installed it somewhere yourself) you can easily use Google Analytics. Download the free plug-in called “Google Analyticator”. After you activate it, it will prompt you on how to set it up.