How to Open a Google Analytics Account

Driving traffic to your website without tracking and analyzing what those visitors do is like adding water to a leaky bucket. To get the most out of your traffic, you must analyze visitor behavior to see what they’re doing why they aren’t doing more of what you want them to do.

Google Analytics will help you do just that.

But before you can track and analyze your website data, you need to open a Google Analytics account and get started, which is exactly what I’ll show you below.

4 Steps to Open a Google Analytics Account

Getting started with Google Analytics is easy. You can open an account and set up tracking on your website in less than 15 minutes by following four simple steps.

Step 1 – Sign Up For Google Analytics

You need a Google account to get started with Google Analytics. I’m assuming most of you already have a Gmail account at a minimum, or a Google Workspace account for your business. You can use that same login information to access Google Analytics.

Navigate to Google Analytics, and then simply click the “Sign In” or “Get Started” button to proceed.

Follow the prompts on the page to complete your Google Analytics account creation.

You’ll be asked to provide a name for the account (your website name or business name makes the most sense) and configure your data sharing settings.

Step 2 – Add Your Website to Your Google Analytics Account

Google needs very little information from you to set up your account, including:

• Domain
• Country
• Time Zone

Once you have provided this information, click “Finish”. You now have your Analytics account set up for your web site. However, on your dashboard, next to your site, you will see a small exclamation point. This means that you did not set up your web site to be tracked by Google Analytics yet.

Step 3 – Create a Property

From your “Admin” page navigate to “Account” and then “Property.” From here, click “Create Property.”

The property is essentially a container of data for your Google Analytics account. Since Google Analytics has evolved over the years and people have multiple websites or apps that they’re using to track data from a single account, you just need to create a separate property for each one.

Most of you will only need a single property (for your website). But you’ll always have the option to add more if you decide to use Google Analytics for additional sites. You won’t need to create individual accounts for each one (just a new property for each).

Now open the advanced settings of the property you’re setting up and enable the universal analytics property.

Step 4 – Add Google Analytics to Your Site

Now you’ve officially opened your Google Analytics account. But that account is useless if you’re not tracking data on website. So we’re going to take it just one extra step here by granting Google access to your site for tracking purposes.

There are two ways to do this:

• Use a WordPress plugin (if your site is powered by WordPress)
• Manually add the code snippet

If your web site is run by WordPress, there are WordPress plugins that you can install onto your site that will automatically enter the code into all of your pages. This is a very big time-saver if you run a WordPress blog or site, as you have the potential for many pages.

If you know your HTML, copy and paste the code provided by Google into the footer of any page you want tracked on your web site. For those of you uncomfortable messing with your site’s code, you can always get a developer to do this for you very quickly.

Google this code, and all you need to do is copy and paste it into where it needs to go. This will depend on the type of site you have.

For plugins, you’ll need to have your unique Google Analytics tracking ID ready. And your code snippet can simply be found from the “Tracking Info” menu of your dashboard.

Once this is all done, wait a few minutes and then check back to your dashboard. You should see that the exclamation point disappeared and in its place is a little green check mark. This means that Google Analytics has successfully been installed and is now tracking your visitors.

Just known that it can take up to 24 hours for Google Analytics to officially start working and track data from your website.

Benefits of Using Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps you measure, collect, report, and ultimately analyze your website data for the purpose of understanding visitor behavior and for making actionable adjustments. It analytics provides valuable insights on the number of visitors, page views, visit duration, conversion rates, and much more.

You can use it to define and measure calls to action, validate tests for desired actions, and just dig deeper into how people are behaving when they land on any page of your website.

Here are a few reasons to consider using web analytics:

• You get the statistical and often surprising facts on what customers are really doing—not just what you think or hope they are doing. You’ll learn about the likes and dislikes of your customers and use this knowledge to revise your site.
• Web analytics can help you understand the conversion rate of your visitors and provide you with solutions to maximize the conversion rate.
• You can determine which traffic sources drive the most traffic and which drive the most conversions for your particular business.
• Preventing users from “bouncing” away from your website may also affect your search engine rankings, so using analytics to improve visitor engagement is critical.
• All this can result in a healthier bottom line for your company and improved ROI on all your marketing efforts, because even traffic from off-line campaigns will make you money if the website works better.

The average conversion rate is around one to two percent, but some top sites have conversion rates at ten, twenty, or thirty percent or more. The Schwan’s online grocery site is said to have a conversion rate of around 42 percent.

They got there by analyzing data and making adjustments to their site. So never accept the average, not when there are such great analytics tools available that can help you get much better conversion rates. Online advertising generates a huge volume of data that can be measured and analyzed. When you know exactly what marketing efforts produce the best ROI, you can then confidently and successfully pour money into these areas. This is a big part of why internet marketing has become so successful and dominant.

Google Analytics Basics

After opening a Google Analytics account your will have to wait for it to gather information. It may take up to 24 hours for Google to start processing information from your site. But if you start seeing statistics after you log in to your account, you may now start monitoring your traffic.

Look at the overview. Each site has a dashboard, or a central place to view the most important statistics about your traffic. After you log in to your account, you can navigate to your reporting page to view and customize different data that you want to see.

Here are some key terms you should know in Google Analytics:

• Visits – the number of unique individuals who have visited your site.
• Pageviews – often called “hits”, this is how many times your site was viewed.
• Pages/Visit – as you can probably guess, this is the average number of pages each visitor looks at before they move on.
• Bounce Rate – this is what percentage of viewers looked at the first page they came to and then left. You want this number to be as low as possible.
• Avg. Time on Site – the average length of time spent by each visitor on your site.
• % New Visits – how many visitors were new (obviously).

Your dashboard will give you a snapshot of all these statistics. Under those statistics is a colorized map of where your visitors are browsing from. The darker the green, the more people are visiting in that country.

You can also look at your Traffic Sources, shown as a pie chart detailing where your readers are coming from. Common sources include direct traffic (they entered in your URL manually), search engines, and referring sites, meaning visitors clicked on a link from another site that led to your site.

Viewing this report will allow you to drill down to different traffic sources: what they are, how long visitors from those sources are staying, and so on. This will let you analyze your traffic sources and determine where you should focus your efforts on. For example, if valuable traffic is coming from one site where visitors are sticking around and reading multiple pages, you know that visitors from that site are high quality, and you should work hard to maintain a good presence there.

If you’d like to know more about your visitors and what they are like, Google Analytics has you covered. This report will let you figure out what types of browsers your visitors are using, what operating systems they are running, how loyal they are, and so on. Finding out how long their visits are with a breakdown by 10-second increments is another valuable tool. If you want a successful site, you need to be analyzing your traffic, and Google Analytics allows you that opportunity – for free.

Final Thoughts

Every website needs to have Google Analytics installed.

If you don’t already have a good analytics program and clearly defined on-page calls to action, stop right now and do this before you invest any more in efforts to drive traffic. Analytics is at the heart of increasing engagement and conversions.