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By Alex Woods on January 11, 2011
Ok, so you've finished creating a website and you want the world to come and pay it a visit. But how do you know how many people are coming to your site? And where are they coming from?
Information on how people are using your website is near essential for any business. It can show you which pages are most popular and, if you're selling through your site, it can tell you which pages you should concentrate on to maximise sales. In order to track and analyse this kind of website data, we recommend setting up a Google Analytics account for your site.
Google Analytics (GA) is free, easy to set up and incredibly powerful, but it can be a little intimidating at first. Here's our quick guide on how to get started.
Setting up a GA account
All you need to do to setup a free account is visit Google Analytics, choose to create an account, fill in all the details and away you go!
Linking Google Analytics to Your Site
In order to link your Google Analytics account to your site you'll have to set up a 'profile'. Ordinarily this would involve fiddling about with your website's code but BaseKit's website builder makes it really easy. You can just copy and paste your Google Analytics profile ID (which looks something like this: UA-12345678-1) into the Google Analytics Settings field in the 'manage' section of the BaseKit editor. There's a screenshot of this below:
Your ID number can be found on the 'Overview' page of Google Analytics when you first login as per the below pic:
The dashboard shows a snapshot of all sorts of information about your website. On the left-hand side of your dashboard you have a range of options to dig into the details a bit more, but before you have a look around, make sure you remember to choose the date range that you want to look at data for. You specify the dates on the right-hand side of your dashboard at the top. You can always access this section, it's situated on the same spot of every page in GA.
The various sections that make up your dashboard are listed below. You can also customise them, should you choose.
What can you measure with GA?
On the left hand side of your GA dashboard you will see a column with various data types.
Visitors
This shows the amount of visitors that visited your site. You can filter these visitors for visit frequency, geography, language and more.
Traffic sources
How did people come to your site?
There are a few traffic sources that Google tracks:
- direct - people typed in your web address in the browser straight away
- referrals - people that clicked on a link from another website to your site
- search engines - Google, Bing, Yahoo etc
You can also see which keywords sent traffic to your site. Keywords are the search terms people enter into search engines like Google. These keywords can be both paid (i.e. on Google AdWords - if you're using it - the ads above and to the right of the main search results) and organic. (the main search results)
Content
This section shows information for specific pages of your website. What are your most popular pages, for example, and how long did people spend looking at them? You can also have a look at what the 'navigation history' of your visitors was - to which page did they navigate when they left your homepage, for instance?
Goals
Goals in GA are the targets for your site that you define. These could be registrations, sign-ups for newsletters, downloads or sales, for example. GA counts the amount of successful goals and the goal conversion rate for you. We'll have more on goals in the sequel to this article!
The easiest way to get to grips with Google Analytics is to have a play around with it. It's quite easy to use and you can't break anything on your site, so don't worry! There is a wealth of data to look at, and it can really help you shape the future of your website and your business, so keep logging in every now and then to see how your site is performing.
In our next Google Analytics article we'll dig into some of the sections in a bit more detail, and show you how you can set up goals for your site.
Coming soon!
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