Google Analytics tells you how many people visit the site, where they come from and what they do there. It is a Google product, free to start with, that you set up with your own Google account and connect to your site. We neither sell nor run it: the hosting keeps the site, Analytics measures who visits it. This article is the shortest road to your first numbers.
Get it measuring, in five steps
| 1 |
Create the Google Analytics account with a Google account of your own, preferably one you will not lose (not an employee’s who may leave).
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| 2 |
Create a property and a Web data stream, with your site’s address. Google Analytics gives you a measurement ID, which begins with G-.
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| 3 |
Put that ID on the site. On WordPress the simplest road is a plugin that takes it: Google’s own plugin (Site Kit) or another you trust. You can also paste Google’s code into the theme’s header area. Paste the code only once: duplicated, it counts every visit twice.
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| 4 |
Test. Open the site in a private window and, in Analytics, look at the Realtime report. Your visit should appear within moments. The other reports take longer to fill; that is normal.
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| 5 |
Clear the site cache. If you run a cache plugin, purge it so that the stored pages carry the new code.
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What to look at first
| Report |
The question it answers |
| Realtime |
Is anyone on the site right now? It confirms the installation works. |
| Acquisition |
Where visitors come from: search, social media, direct links, other sites. |
| Engagement, pages and screens |
Which pages are viewed most, and which nobody opens. |
| Events |
What visitors do: clicks, forms sent, downloads. |
| Tech |
Computer, phone or tablet: which devices they arrive on. |
Do not try to read everything at once. Pick one question (for example, “where do my visitors come from?”) and answer it. Then pick the next.
Two things Analytics will not tell you
It does not tell you where you appear on Google, or which searches brought people. That is in Search Console, another Google tool: see getting your site into Search Console. The two can be linked. Nor does it count visitors who refused cookies, when your site asks for consent.
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Take your own visits out of the count. If you and your team go into the site every day, your visits count as if they were customers’. In the plugin, exclude logged-in users, and in Analytics use the internal-traffic filter.
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Does the site fail to load because of the code, or turn slow? Tell us the address and we will see what the server returns.
Open a support ticket
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