Setting Up Your Google Analytics Account: Best Practices

So that concludes section two of the Google Analytics Bootcamp. Let us segue to the next section, which is best practices for setting up a Google Analytics account, which is really just how you get started in Google Analytics. And I'll go to one of my Google Analytics accounts where I'm tracking some of my customer data.

No, on behalf of my clients. But later on in the course, we will also share the link to the Google Analytics demo account. And I'll explain a little bit more about what that means.

But for right now, I'm just going to go through the steps of how to set up a Google Analytics account for the first time. So you would go to analytics.Google.com. Everyone's there. So this is the home screen of your Google Analytics account.

And here's a particular client, and this is their information. But we will go through that from the standpoint of a demo account. The demo account is for the Google Merch store.

Google offers merch and swag, essentially, for their customers, everything from apparel to mugs to mouse pads for their brand and affiliated brands like Android. We'll look into that in a little bit. But for now, I'm just going to show you how to set up an account by going to analytics.Google.com And then when you get there, you click on Admin.

Once you're in Admin, then click Create up here. And you want to create an account. So you would put your account name.

I'll just say test account. You would also provide information here on how you want to share the data that's collected on your account. Google is asking if they can use it to do modeling or for technical support.

Provide recommendations so you can make those decisions. And then you click Next. Now we want to add a property.

We will put a property name. So you can see here, add a web property. So you go to Admin, where we were.

We were going to create. And then now we're in the property. We could go directly to create a property as well.

But first, we did the account. And now we're on the property level. And we'll say property X. You list the time zone.

I happen to be in New York. So I will say New York time. And the currency that's tracking for the revenue.

So I will stick with the US dollar since I am in New York. And then go next. And now you will answer a few questions about your business.

So you can describe your business, the category that you are in. So let me just make something up for this purpose. We'll say beauty and fitness.

And what is your business objective? To get recommendations personalized for your business. Select the objective most relevant to you. You can select more than one objective.

But a maximum of two is recommended. So what are you going to use your website for? Is it generating leads? There are a lot of business websites that might do booking appointments, that type of thing. Or is it to drive sales? I'm going to say drive sales.

I'm a health and beauty brand, let's say. And as an ecommerce website, I also want to view and understand web and or app traffic. Measure your website or app visitors and the channels that drive their visits.

Yeah, that would be important to me because I'm going to be doing some marketing, and I want to know where it's coming from. Which marketing campaigns? Is it organic search? Is it paid search? So that would be important to me. But I could also have chosen to view user engagement or retention, learn how people explore the products and services on your website or app, so that I'll get more into retention, or a different business objective not listed there. This is not critical, as if you make the wrong decision here.

You can still, it's just going to really impact the recommendations that it will initially provide for you. But over time, Google algorithms will learn more about your website anyway and make recommendations based upon what it feels makes the most sense as it sees the actual way in which visitors behave on your website. All right, then you would fill out the terms and service.

Just go all the way to the bottom, right? Very extensive, but once you do so, accept them and say, I do accept. All right, now I can start collecting data. So let's just catch up.

We started the Google Analytics account, then we added the web property, selected a category on the business side, explained how we want to use Google Analytics, and then filled out the terms of service. Now we get to add a data stream. Where is it actually going to grab the data from? So you get a choice of platforms, web, if it's a website, or an app, Android app or iOS app.

So the app and web traffic will be looked at separately. So let us just say it's going to be a website. Okay, so one thing I will point out, anytime you see this three stars, blue stars, it relates to a new feature based upon Google AI tools, right, so this wasn't something that many people would have seen last year, or as recent as maybe five, six months ago, but as we move forward, you see more and more of this.

Automatically measure interactions and content on your sites in addition to standard page view measurement. So it's something that's offering you, you might as well say yes, you know, it's just additional AI-driven insight that you can get, and it's telling you to measure these additional things. But other than that, you would put your website in there.

All right, so this is actually a client website, I'm just doing it for it, it's not a health and beauty website. But all right, it will do for now, since this is already being tracked. I think the problem is that, yes, okay, I was including the HTTP when I did the copy and paste, and I don't think it's allowed to do that.

So then I would, now that that's done correctly, I can create and continue there. And now it will then say, start collecting data, and data collection may take up to 40 hours to get started. If you go next, it'll tell you that data collection is pending, right? So that means now that you have successfully added a data stream, the data stream is from the web and from a particular website address.

The next step would be to go to the admin and add the Google Tags. What are Google Tags? This is the way that you track data. It identifies to Google that this is a page that needs to be tracked.

You might not want all your pages on your website to be tracked. There might be pages that are just for customers' information that's behind a login or something like that, or there might be pages that are seasonal, you only use certain times of the year. So you would only wanna track the pages, or you only wanna put a tag on the pages that you want to track, right? And it's pretty straightforward to obtain this, and we'll go back to the Google Analytics account.

All right, so it's gonna talk to me about that, but I go back to admin, and I see your data streams down here. So, going back to this page, right? So in the stream, details, copy, in the section, copy the measurement ID. So what are we talking about? Data streams.

Just so you understand, this is the admin menu, and some of the information or areas you can go to are account level, the account details, and the property. Remember, we had an account, and then we had a property, and then we had the data collection, the data stream. We can go to data streams, and now you click on the stream detail, right? So you click on the stream, and now, where it says measurement ID, you just copy like that, very simple.

It's on your dashboard now. So what do you do with that? You go, now, you can have your developer do it, or if you're familiar with the admin back-end of your website, if it's a WordPress website, let's say, or Joomla, or Shopify, you can go use your text editor or the CMS, which would be the WordPress, et cetera, and you just type, or you just go and paste that snippet of HTML code before the closing head tag on each webpage, right? So each webpage has head tags as part of the back-end. It's where, for SEO purposes, you put the metadata.

So in this case, you also put the tag for Google tags. If you have any questions about it, you can Google it, and there's information about that, or any person, any web coder, or whoever's maintaining the website would know exactly how to do that. So it's very straightforward.

Again, just going to this section, clicking on the stream, and then just grabbing the measurement ID, simple as that. And this means that once that's installed on your page, you can track the activity on that page, which is the foundation of your Google Analytics account.