Google Analytics Extensive Guide: Complete Tutorial for Beginners

by Saswat

What is Google Analytics (GA)? In simple words, Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool, provided by Google. It collects detailed information about your website or app visitors and presents that information in the form of an easy-to-understand report. You can say it is your website ‘Report Card’!

Why is it needed? If you run a website, you must know:

  • How many people are coming to your site?
  • Where are they coming from (Facebook, Google Search, YouTube, or Direct)?
  • How long are they spending time on your site?
  • Which pages are they looking at the most?
  • Are they watching with mobile or computer?
  • From which pages are they leaving the site?

Google Analytics answers these questions, which help you to run your website, blog or online business better.

🛠️ the necessary items

You will need two things to start Google Analytics:

  1. 📨 A Google Account: (eg Gmail account). If you do not have an account yet, open one for free.
  2. 💻 A website: eg www.yourwebsite.com where you put the analytics code

🧭 Step-by-Step Google Analytics Setup

Let’s start the setup process.

🚀 Sign up to Google Analytics

  1. Go to Google Analytics website
  2. Log in with your Google account.
  3. Click the ‘Start Measuring’ button.

🧾 Create account

  1. Account Name: Give your account a name. It can be the name of your business or website. For example, ‘My Business Account’.
  2. Below you will see some data sharing settings. Default settings are usually good.
  3. Click ‘Next’.

🏗️ Create Property

  1. Property Name: Enter your website name or URL here. such as, ‘www.yourwebsite.com. Under one account you can create separate properties for multiple websites.
  2. Reporting Time Zone: Select your time zone. Select ‘India’ for India.
  3. Currency: Select your business currency (eg, Indian Rupee – INR).
  4. Click ‘Next’.

🏢 Give Business Information

  1. Industrial Category: Select the category of your business or website.
  2. Business Size: Choose your business size.
  3. Click ‘Next’ and then click ‘Create’ and finish creating the property.

🧩 Create Data Stream (Data Stream) and collect tracking code This is the most important step. From here you will get the code, which you need to put on your website.

  1. choose a platform: You choose ‘Web’.
  2. set up your web stream:
    • Website URL: Enter the entire URL of your website (eg, https://www.yourwebsite.com).
    • Stream Name: Give a name, such as ‘Website Stream’.
    • You will see an option called ‘Enhanced Measurement’. Keep it on. It automatically tracks page views, scrolls, outbound clicks, etc.
  3. Click ‘Create Stream’.

<> Install the tracking code on the website Once the stream is created you will see a new page. Here is a section called ‘Tagging Instructions’.

  1. You will see a ‘Measurement ID’, which will look like this: G-xxxxxxxxx. . . . This is your tracking ID.
  2. This ID and a small javascript code (Global Site Tag – gtag.js) should be placed in every page of your website inside the <head> section.

How to put the code? It depends on how your website is created.

  • If you use WordPress (the easiest way):
    • Go to your WordPress dashboard.
    • Click ‘Plugins‘ > ‘Add New‘.
    • Search ‘Site Kit by Google‘ and install and activate.
    • This plugin will ask you to connect to your Google account. In a few steps, connect your Google Analytics account. The plugin will automatically insert the code. You don’t need to know coding.
  • If you want to put the code manually:
    • Log in to your website’s file manager (eg cPanel, FTP).
    • Find the file header.php (or something like that) of your website’s theme or template
    • Edit the file <head> tag and save the code given by Google Analytics right after that.

After the code is installed successfully, it may take 24 to 48 hours for the data to arrive. However, the visitor can be seen within a few minutes on the Realtime report.

📊 Understanding Google Analytics Dashboard

If you log in to your dashboard, you will see a few main parts:

  • 🏠 Home: This gives a holistic picture of your website. Here you will see how many users have come in the last 28 minutes, most viewed pages, most traffic sources etc.
  • 📈 Reports: This is the main part. Here you can analyze all types of data. There is a menu on the left side.
  • 🧭 Explore: Here you can create custom reports from your data. It is a bit advanced level.
  • 📢 Advertising: If you are using Google Ads, this section is for you.

📊 Important reports and how to use them

The report section menu is divided into several parts. Some of the most important reports for beginners are:

🧭 Acquisition Reports

This report tells you where your visitors are coming from –

  • Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition: Here you will see how many users have come from different sources.
    • Organic Search: Visitors from search engines like Google, Bing etc.
    • DIRECT: If someone enters your website address directly in the browser.
    • Referral: There is a link to your site on another website, a visitor comes via clicking on the link.
    • Social: Visitors from social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
    • Paid Search: Visitors coming via Ads placed on Google or any other search engine.

🕒 Engagement Reports

This report tells you what the visitors are doing after they come to your site –

  • Reports > engagement > Events: Everything in GA4 is counted as a ‘event‘. Eg:
    • PAGE_VIEW: If you see a page.
    • scroll: Scrolling up to 90% of a page.
    • CLICK: Clicking on a link.
  • Reports > engagement > Pages and screens: Here you can see which pages of your website have been viewed the most, which pages people spend the most time on. It helps you understand which content is popular.
  • Reports > engagement > Conversions: This is very important.
    • If someone submits your ‘Contact Us’ form.
    • If someone buys a product.
    • If someone sign up for your newsletter. You need to tell Google Analytics yourself which event to count as conversion.

Demographic Reports

This report is about details of your visitors –

  • Reports > demographic > overview: Here you can see the details of your visitors’ age, gender, country, city etc. It helps you understand your target audience better.

💻 Technical Report (Tech Reports)

This report tells you how visitors are entering your site –

  • Reports > tech > Tech details: Here you will see which visitors are using Chrome, Firefox), Device (Desktop, Mobile, Tablet) and operating system (Windows, Android, iOS). If you see that most people are coming from mobile, then it is very important to make your website mobile-friendly.

📊 Practical example: How to make a decision from the data

Data should not only be viewed, but decisions must be made from that data.

🔥 A visitor saw a blog post titled ‘10 Best Web Development Tools‘ in the ‘Pages and Screens‘ report and spent an average of 5 minutes there.

  • Decision: People have an interest in web development tools. You can write a few more blogs on this topic or make a YouTube video.

🌐 In the ‘Acquisition‘ report, you see that 60% of your website’s traffic is coming from Facebook.

  • Decision: Facebook is a very effective platform for you. You should spend more time on your Facebook page, post it regularly, and be active in the Facebook group.

💻 In the ‘Tech’ report, 80% of visitors were using mobile devices, but in the ‘Engagement‘ report, the average time of mobile users was much less than that of desktop users.

  • Decision: There is a problem with the mobile version of your website. Maybe the site is slowly loading or navigation is complicated. You should immediately improve the mobile experience of your website.

⭐ Some pro tips for beginners

🔗 Connect Google Search Console: Connecting Google Search Console with Google Analytics, you can see the Google search performance of your website (how many visitors have come via a keyword search). This is very important for SEO.

⏰ Check regularly: Practice checking analytics at least once a week. This will help you understand your website’s performance trend.

🧠 Don’t get immersed in data: Don’t get frustrated with a lot of data in the beginning. Just pay attention to the above mentioned main reports.

🎯 Set up Conversion: Mark the most important action (such as form submission) for your website as a conversion. This will help you measure the success of your business.

Learning Google Analytics is not a matter of a day. Keep practicing slowly and change your strategy according to the data. All the best!

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