Google is a well-known and well-respected search engine. So much so in fact, that its name is synonymous with web search. But that’s not all that Google does. The company also offers a host of free services that every webmaster and web designer should know about.

One of the best of these offerings is Google Analytics, a free service that both records visitor data and helps you make sense of the information. Collectively, these processes are called web analytics.

But what do that really mean? Basically, it’s about analyzing where your users go and what they do on your website. It’s essentially the marketing side of web design. Many books on the subject will dive right into issues such as how to set up campaign specific landing pages or conduct a-b testing, but even a small site stands to gain from something as simple as the tracking of visitors.

With Google Analytics, you’ll know which pages on your site are most popular. You can also see what paths visitors take through your site and gauge how long they stay. When they leave, you’ll know what page they left from. You can even find out where in the world they are located.

As is the case with many free products, setup can be challenging, as there’s little to no customer support available. Don’t worry though. I’ll walk you through the process and show you how to view some simple stats.

Setting Up Google Analytics

So how do you start tracking all this wonderful information on your own web site?

First, get a Google account. Then, sign up for Google Analytics. Finally, add a website profile. (You can track more than one site. In fact, I track several for different clients.) To do this, enter your url into the signup page and click continue. Google will return a piece of code that you’ll need to copy and paste to each page on your site that you wish have analyzed.

Here’s where you could use a PHP include. If you have a footer include that’s on every page, simply put the Google code into that include, and it’s on every page. Or, if you’ve templated the site, using Dreamweaver for example, you can put the code in the template, and that will ensure it’s on each page.

The code won’t be apparent to viewers (unless they choose to view the underlying code), and it shouldn’t disturb your layouts. I usually put the code at the bottom of the page, before the body tag.

What does this code do, you ask? Well, it’s a piece of Javascript that sends information about the browser back to Google’s servers whenever someone looks at a page on your site. By recording the IP address of the viewer and the relevant timestamps, Google Analytics can track how viewers move through your site and how long they stay on different pages.

You’ve now completed the most important step in web analytics, gathering the data. In Part 2 of this post, I’ll show you how to analyze and view the information you’ve collected.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Marketing, RESOURCES, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.