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Google Analytics: A Marketing Tool For Your Website

It is a most important marketing tool that is not used enough by small and medium sized businesses. Marketers will always benefit by using Google Analytics.

It’s important to make it both clear and easy for you to embed Google Analytics onto your web site. It is a free tool that allows you to track and analyze your website traffic. Your first step is to set up a Gmail account if you do not have one. This is necessary to access analytics.

Having a Google account does not grant you access to Analytics. It’s just a first step. Once that is complete, register for Google Analytics. It’s a one-time simple step.

Next you will log in and click on the “admin tab”. A pop-up box will then continue to step you through the setting up process. You are setting the website want to track.

Accounts An account is your access point for Analytics, and the top-most level of organization. With one account you can have access to Analytics, so you can identify which accounts you want to track. How you manage the relationship between accounts and properties is up to you. You can use one account for each property, or you can use one account for many properties.

You can have many Analytics accounts. If you do not have an account, sign up for one at www.google.com/analytics.

Properties

A property is a website, a mobile application, or a device (e.g. a kiosk or point of sale device.) An account can contain one or more properties.

Within an Analytics account, you add the properties from which you want to collect data. When you add a property to an account, analytics can generate a tracking code to collect its data. The tracking code contains a unique ID to identify its data. This makes it identifiable in your reports. Analytics also creates one unfiltered view for each property you add.

Properties

A view is your access point for reports; a defined view of data from a property. You give users access to a view so they can see the reports based on that view’s data. A property can contain one or more views.

For example, within a property you might have:

  • One view of all the data for www.example.com
  • One view of only AdWords traffic to www.example.com
  • One view of only traffic to a subdomain like www.sales.example.com
  • When you add a property to an account, analytics creates the first view for that property.

 

That first view has no filters, and so neither includes all the data for that property. You should leave this original view unfiltered so that you always have a view in which you can see all the data. You can create more views when you apply filters to them. Then they each can include the specific subset of data in which you’re interested.

Once you create a view, the reports for that view will show data from the creation date of the view forward. For example: if you create a view on June 1, it will only show data from June 1 forward. It will not show any data collected before June 1.

If you delete a view, that specific perspective of the data is gone forever. Don’t delete a view if you think you might ever want to report on that particular perspective of the data.

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