Why & How to Setup Google Analytics

Yesterday I talked about the merits of using Google Analytics, which is a free program (online application) from Google that you can use to track your visitor origins and calculate your advertising sales conversion rates.

My argument for using it (or a similar piece of tracking software) is that without it you’re really “driving blind” and headed for a big wreck!

In this post lets setup Google Analytics and install the code on a WordPress site.  The whole process should take about 5 minutes.

Your first step is to visit Google Analytics and setup a free account. >>  If you already use Gmail, try using the same username and password to gain access.

The rest of the Google Analytics Setup Continues…

Before you see the above screen, you’ll see an “ADD WEBSITE PROFILE >>” link that leads to an area where you add your website details.  You have the option of creating an entirely new tracking code or adding one to an existing web site.  I added a tracking code for my Rich Sage Underground since I’ll spend some time advertising and marketing it in the coming months and years.

At this point there are two things to keep in mind:

• IF you are inserting the tracking code, you need to find your FOOTER.PHP file in the wp-contents folder of your WordPress installation.  Then add the code ABOVE the BOTTOM [/body] “tag”!!!
• Then return to Analytics to ‘activate’ and have Google start the process of collecting data.
• In my case, I’ve put the code on PHP file because somewhere I read that when inserting a NON-WordPress page into a domain running WordPress, that it had to be a PHP file. I don’t have the time to test that  — I just added the Analytics code script and uploaded.  Now all is well, and tracking has started.

Just ONE MORE Vital Step Left:

• Tracking is nice.  Conversion tracking is “the holy grail” of web success building.
• In the Analytics setup press “EDIT” and get into an area where you can track “CONVERSION TRACKING”, that looks like the below image.  When you get into this feature, you’ll start to really build success with a magnifying glass hovering above your daily work!
• Setup a conversion tracking step following the setup Google Analytics advices.
• IF you really want to get advanced in the setup, you can LIST EXCEPTIONS, where Google Analytics will excludes visitors from some domains when calculating results!  I don’t need this feature at this time.

CONVERSION TRACKING NOTE: What Google Analytics does is track your visitor from the sales page to a “ThankYou” page or “Thanks for Signing up” type page.  By doing that the system can calculate your cost of a sale or lead or just a signup to whatever you’re selling.

Now your setup is done, and you just need to take the code that was generated in the previous step and paste on your WordPress site.  I’ve done all this fun stuff and now I am off to finding the Members I can work with to build Utopia.

Your benefit, which I cannot stress more, is that you will know to the dollar your cost to acquire a new customer, member, signup, etc. etc.  Having those details in hand are vital to any business success.

Carpe Diem,
Rich Sage