How to set up Google Analytics on your website

In order to be able to utilise Google Analytics, you will need to create a Google Analytics account and link it to your website property. You will also be able to customise different views of the data and tailor it to specific people in your company with specific roles.

Follow these steps to set up Google Analytics

Set up an account on Google Analytics. If you possess a Gmail or YouTube account, you already have a Google account however we recommend that you set up one exclusively for your business. Something such as yourbusiness@gmail.com will work perfectly.

Log in to Google Analytics. When you create your Google account, navigate to www.google.com/analytics. From here, you can sign up and proceed to set up a new Google Analytics account.

Name your account. We recommend that you give it your business name. Following on from this, name the website that you will be tracking. If you have a number of different websites for your business, this will be very important. Make sure that you track only one website for one analytics view.

The next step is to put in the URL for your website.  Choose a category such as health care, beauty, and fitness, etc. Pick your time zone and then agree to their terms of service.

Get your tracking code for Google Analytics

Navigate to the page where you get the tracing code for your website. You will need to insert this on every single page. That’s why we recommend that you put this code in the header of your website.  If you are not happy to do this you can take the piece of code and send it to your website developer to have them add it.

Once that is installed, Google is going to start recording all of the activity on your website. It can take a few hours or up to a day to start seeing data in your new account.

The Various Google Analytics Permissions as well as Levels 

If you are the owner and sole user of the account you shouldn’t be worried about this. However, if you have – or need – to add additional users you should assign the correct permissions at the right level in order to avoid:

• Users lurking around other views or properties, or
• Permanent loss of data owing to someone messes up some setting.

There are three levels for permissions and four types of permissions for each level.

Permissions Levels

• Level 1: Account – Grants access to all Properties and Views in the Account.
• Level 2: Property – Grants access to all Views in the Property.
• Level 3: View – Grants access only to that View.

Permission Actions

Read & Analyse  

• See reports in addition to manipulating data within them (sort, make use of report filter, utilise the second dimension, etc.)
• Create/Edit/Share personal assets such as segments, dashboards, annotations or custom alerts
• Collaborate
• All permissions from “Read & Analyse”
• Can collaborate on shared assets
• Edit
• All Permissions from “Collaborate” and ”Read & Analyse”
• View Level: Delete that view
• Create or edit goals
• Create or edit channel groupings
• e-Commerce set-up
• Put together calculated metrics
• Add or remove filters (ONLY existing filters)
• Property level: All view level permissions
• Delete that property
• Establish new views
• Organise the “Referral Exclusion List”, ”Session settings”, “User-ID”, Remarketing as well as “Organic Search Sources”
• Link Adwords, Search Console in addition to other Products
• Create or edit custom dimensions and metrics
• Account Level: All property level permissions
• Edit or Create Filters
• Delete the account
• Establish new properties
• See “Change History” log
• See “Rubbish bin” (Trash can) as well as restore deleted elements

 Manage Users

• This by itself doesn’t grant any additional permission but a user can manage other users exclusive of access to the data or, alternatively, assets in the account.
• Add and remove users in addition to editing their permissions.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Want to learn more about web analytics? Check out our Paid Advertising and Web Analytics Course. For more information, please follow this link.