How to connect Google analytics to your website correctly: Step-by-step guide

Google Analytics is one of the most useful tools available for anyone who manages a website. It provides you with detailed data in a variety of areas. In the world of digital marketing, analyzing data is a key part of a successful strategy. And one of the most powerful and effective tools for analyzing web traffic and behaviour for this purpose is Google Analytics.

In this article, we will take a detailed look at how to connect Google Analytics to your website properly. This tool will allow you to track your website traffic, analyze user behaviour, determine the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and much more.

What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you analyze your website traffic.

While “web analytics” sounds like a very small area of your digital presence, the value of Google Analytics is actually huge.

This is because, for most companies, the website serves as the centre of all digital traffic. If you do any marketing (search advertising, social media advertising), your users are likely to visit your website somewhere along their user journey.

With its help, you can view how many people visit your site, where they come from, how long they stay on it and much more. This information will be very useful when deciding to improve and promote your site.

Why you need Google Analytics

Before we get to the setup, let’s talk about why you need Google Analytics and how to connect Google Analytics to a website. It is necessary for the following purposes:

1. Find out how many unique visitors you have on your site
2. Real-time user tracking
3. Which pages of a web resource are most visited
4. How much time users spend on the resource
5. Source-channel tracking (e.g., from search engines, social media,
6. advertising campaigns and other sources).
7. You’ll be able to track which ad campaigns are bringing in the most conversion traffic
8. Determine ROI

See also how to set up contextual advertising in Google Ads.

Setting up Google Analytics

Your web presence is the best way to give you a holistic view of the effectiveness of all the campaigns you are running to promote your product/service online. Google Analytics is a free tool to help you track the effectiveness of your digital marketing.

Now, let’s move on to setting up Google Analytics. This process can be divided into several steps:

Account creation

Tracking visitors is an important aspect of running an online business. Thus, many popular tools help to track visitors and create detailed segmented reports on various web traffic analysis parameters.

• Go to the official Google Analytics website (https://analytics.google.com) and sign in to your Google account. If you don’t have one, create one.
• Fill in the account details: Enter an account name (for example, your company name) and select the industry to which your site belongs.
• Once logged in, click on “Get Started” and enter information about your site, including its name and URL.
• Select the settings for your account, including the time zone and reports you want.
• Confirm the terms of use and create an account.

Account setup

Successful marketing campaigns are data-driven. If you have detailed data about your website visitors, you can customize your marketing campaigns to attract targeted customers and convert them into leads.

• Create a new property: Under “Account”, select “Create Property” and enter a property name (for example, the name of your website).
• Select Platform: Specify your website’s platform (website, mobile app, etc.).
• Select time zone: Specify the time zone of your region.
• Select an advertising report: If you have advertising campaigns, select the appropriate advertising report.
• Click “Create”: After filling in all the data, click “Create” to finalize the creation of the property.

Now that you have a Google Analytics account, let’s customize it for your specific site.

Google Analytics 4 or Universal Analytics – which should you choose?

You are faced with an important choice: to use Google Analytics 4 or Universal Analytics. Google Analytics 4 is the latest analytics feature offered by Google. It was launched in 2019 as a new standalone system, not as an update to the Universal Analytics product. From July 2023, Google is moving all users to version 4 of the product.

GA4 provides many new reporting features and provides more detailed information about users visiting your website. We suggest focusing on setting up a Google Analytics 4 account, as Google Universal Analytics resources will no longer process website data as of July 1, 2023.

Without further ado, it’s time to learn how to get your Google Analytics account up and running.

Google Analytics Tag Customization

After selecting the version, you must set up a Google Analytics tag on your website. This will allow you to collect data about visits and user actions. To use Google Analytics for your website, you must add a JavaScript code snippet called a Google Analytics tag to each page on which you want to track data.

When someone visits one of your pages, this code links to a JavaScript file that triggers tracking and sends the data to Google Analytics. You can then log into your Google Analytics and see your data organized into various reports.

Once your GA code is installed, you’ll start receiving data into your Google Analytics account that you can share with your clients through visual reports.

Smart keyword research for contextual advertising can help your website increase traffic and sales quickly. Keep finding new opportunities and attract customers with the right keywords.

When setting up Google Analytics for the first time, wait 24 to 48 hours before the data starts to appear. Now let’s understand how to check if Google Analytics is working on your website.

How to check if the Google Analytics tag is working

One of the easiest ways to check if Google Analytics is working is to check the tracking status in Google Analytics. Here’s how to check tags in Google Analytics using the admin panel. First, log in to Google Analytics and navigate to the resource you want to check.

Then follow the steps below:

Click “Administrator” in the lower-left corner of the screen. Tap “Tracking Information” on the Administrator screen in the second column. Then tap “Tracking Code.”

You will then be able to see your tracking status and the number of active users currently on your site. From this page, you can also send test traffic to your site. If you click the “Send Test Traffic” button, Google Analytics will send the traffic to your site.

How to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site

Technique 1. Add the Google tag code to Header.php.

You can add Google Analytics to WordPress by simply copy/pasting the tracking code into your website code (in the “header.php” file).

Click “Appearance” → “Theme Editor”. Click the “header.php ” file to edit its code. Copy the “Tracking Code” from Google Analytics and paste it into the header code right before the </head> tag.

Once complete, wait a few hours as the installation may take up to 48 hours to activate fully.

Technique 2. Install the Google Analytics WordPress plugin.

Installing Google Analytics through a plugin is a great alternative if your theme doesn’t allow you to use the first method.

This process requires the installation of the WordPress Google Analytics plugin. And since the WordPress plugin repository offers many solutions. Two of the best WordPress plugins for Google Analytics to help you get the job done without fuss are GA Google Analytics and MonsterInsights.

Technique 3. Using Google Tag Manager.

Another way to add Google Analytics to your WordPress website is to use Google Tag Manager. This plugin also supports GA4. Follow the steps below:

Navigate to your WordPress dashboard. Click Plugins → Add New. Find “Google Tag Manager” in the text box. Install and activate the plugin.

 

Frequent errors and troubleshooting in Google Analytics

Various errors and problems can occur when working with Google Analytics. Here are some of them and how to fix them:

Invalidly set tag: Check that the Google Analytics tag is set correctly on all website pages.

Duplicate data: Sometimes, duplicate data can occur in Google Analytics. Check that the tag is set only once on each page.

Conclusion

No matter what kind of website you have, it’s always good to know if users visit your site and what they are viewing. Google Analytics supports your business with technology, making it easy to understand user behaviour on your website.

Now that you’ve learned what Google Analytics is and set up the tool, you can order contextual advertising (or try setting it up yourself), track traffic sources, goals, and conversions, view reports on user behaviour, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions:

You can enhance your website data analysis by editing your Google Analytics configuration settings and creating different profiles, playing with filters, creating goals or even customizing events/e-commerce tracking.

These configurations will allow you to analyze your traffic and increase your conversion rate. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us for advice in the comments section.