Google Analytics is the leading analytics platform for tracking website or application performance. Google Analytics is a free tool for analyzing visitor behavior on your site, offered by Google to help you analyze your website traffic. Given that your website is the central part of your digital presence, this is the best way to give you an overview of the effectiveness of your website’s traffic sources. Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track your marketing activities and measure how effective they are.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is part of a variety of tools provided by Google, including Google Search Console and Google Tag Manager. For most companies, websites serve as the hub for all their digital traffic. If you run marketing activities such as search ads or social media ads, your users will likely visit your website somewhere along their user journey.
In this guide, I will explain the ways in which Google Analytics tools can contribute to your marketing efforts, how to open a new Google Analytics account, and explain how Google Analytics tools work and how to analyze the data to draw the necessary conclusions.
Why do we need to use Google Analytics?
You can use Google Analytics for a variety of different purposes; here we will focus on and review three main reasons why people use Google Analytics:
- Improving marketing efforts – The insights you can gain from Analytics reports are essential for improving your marketing. Collected data can help you answer a variety of questions – How much traffic comes to your site through different marketing channels? Which websites refer the most visitors? Where do your website visitors live? What is the conversion rate of visitors from different channels?
The answers to these questions will help you better tailor your marketing efforts. They can show you the right channels to invest in and which marketing channels to slow down promotional efforts for. In addition, this data can help you better define your target audience, among many other useful insights.
- Improving website performance – Analytics reports are also the perfect place to learn about your website and the people who use it. Using data will help you organize the site better and improve the user experience.
- Improving SEO – Google Analytics insights are also important for SEO. The platform helps answer a variety of questions regarding how users find your site and interact with it. In SEO, as in many things, information is power. The more you know about organic traffic and how it arrives at the site, the more you can increase and improve the quantity and quality of traffic.
What is the difference between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4?
The essential differences between UA and GA4 are:
- How user interaction is measured – events instead of sessions
- Connecting GA4 to BigQuery
- Identifying visitor traffic – UA categorizes visitors by device type (mobile, desktop, or tablet) and digital asset type (web or app). In GA4, measurement is cross-platform because Analytics 4 creates a unique ID for each user, making it easy to track them across all platforms.
- Differences in the types of segments that can be created
- Changes in data display and the dashboard – a broader and more intuitive dashboard structure, with automatic data collection and real-time reports of visitor interactions at any given time.
How to open a Google Analytics account?
Getting started with Analytics is easy and simple. First, you need to set up a Google account. If you already use Gmail, Google Drive, or other Google tools, you already have one. If not, it’s easy to set one up.
Once you have an account, sign in to it, and you can start setting up GA and adding Google Analytics to the site.
Go to the Google Analytics dashboard, and click on Admin Settings
Then, click on Create Account
Then a window will open where you enter the account name (it is recommended to enter the website’s name)
Then in the second step, set up the property and enter the property name
It is also recommended to create a Universal Analytics property by clicking on Show advanced options, where you will enter your website address
It is recommended to create both GA4 and UA in parallel to configure optimal tracking
Afterwards, you will be asked questions that mainly help with the user experience and nothing more
After accepting the terms and conditions, a window will open where you will receive the Analytics ID, which measurements will be used, and how to add the tag, which we will discuss in the next part of the guide.
How to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website?
There are 2 ways to implement Google Analytics on a site – implementation using a free plugin and implementation using Google Tag Manager.
Adding Analytics code using the GA Google Analytics plugin in WordPress
After setting up your Analytics account, your account’s tracking ID will appear for you to copy.
Finding the tracking ID – in your account’s main dashboard, go to Admin
Then, in the property column, click on Tracking Info and then on Tracking Code
Then you will see a tracking ID starting with UA
Installing the Analytics plugin in WordPress
Download the GA Google Analytics plugin in WordPress
After installation, enter the tracking code you copied into the plugin settings in the GA Tracking ID field. Additionally, we recommend using the Global Site Tag setting as shown in the image:
That’s it! You have successfully set up Google Analytics on your site using a WordPress plugin.
Adding Analytics code to WordPress using Google Tag Manager
At this stage, you will need to have Google Tag Manager properly installed on your website.
Go to Google Tag Manager and create a new tag
Upon opening, click on Tag Configuration
To add UA
A list of tag types will open for you, click on:
On this page, leave the settings as they are
In the trigger configuration, select All Pages
To add GA4 – Google Analytics 4
Just like with the plugin installation, you will need to know the unique tracking code of your Google Analytics 4 account.
Add a new tag, and select GA4 from the list
Next, enter the ID number of your Analytics account in the Measurement ID
I recommend keeping the settings as shown here and leaving the checkbox for sending a page view checked.
For the trigger, select All Pages again
That’s it! You have installed Universal Google Analytics as well as GA4 on your site.
How to verify that you installed Google Analytics correctly on the site?
To make sure that data on our site is sent to Google Analytics, we will use a free Chrome extension called Google Tag Assistant
After downloading it, go to your site’s home page; the Google tag will appear on the side.
And to activate it, click on Enable, then refresh the page.
Then you will see several tags, one of which is the Google Analytics tag – if it appears in blue or green, it means you have implemented it correctly
If the tag appears in red, there was probably an error during installation, and you should review the guide again and check where you made a mistake.
Summary
In this guide, we went step-by-step through using Analytics, why it is important for you as marketers, and why we truly need Google Analytics. We also covered the important differences between UA and GA4 and opening an Analytics account. Afterwards, we went over the ways in which you can add Google Analytics to your site, and if you followed the guide properly, you can wait a day or two and log into your Google Analytics account to verify that the account is active and tracking traffic properly.
With Google Analytics, you will be able to get started smoothly and receive a wealth of effective information that will help you make strategic and correct decisions for your marketing activity, and more on that in upcoming guides.
About the author
Adi Golan, Campaign Manager at Fialkov Digital, specializes in advanced advertising tools and automations.
