Google Analytics is a free service that is offered by Google that compiles detailed information about users and visitors to your website. Its a great way to see where a visitor is coming from (called a referral) which can include advertising you may have done, stories that may have been written about your business, pay per click networks, and email marketing/blogging. Today I am going to walk you through the steps of setting up this free service in order to start tracking you potential customers.

The main page for Analytics is located at www.google.com/analytics. Here you must create an account or use your existing Google account to sign in. So please do that.

When you log into the main are of Analytics you will see a link on the bottom “Add Website Profile»” - Click that link to add your website.

Next you will “Add a Profile for a new domain” and plug in your domain www.yourwebsite.com..pick the time zone and country. Hit finish.

The next screen you get will spit out the ‘Tracking Code’ - this is the piece of code that you will be sticking on your website in order for Google to track the users to your website. Copy the code block into every webpage you want to track immediately before the tag. If your site has dynamic content you can use a common include or a template. If this is something that you don’t want to touch within your website, than please send it over to your web design or developer and let them know that you are installing Google Analytics.

After about 24 hours, you should be able to log on see the following screen:

Click around and check out all of the reports you can run on users.

Get this setup over this week as next week I will be talking about how your use the information on Google Analytics to you advantage. As always - If you ever have any questions on the article, feel free to contact me or post comments below.