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Google Analytics Extensive Guide: Complete Tutorial for Beginners

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:

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:

📊 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 –

🕒 Engagement Reports

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

Demographic Reports

This report is about details of your visitors –

💻 Technical Report (Tech Reports)

This report tells you how visitors are entering your site –

📊 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.

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

💻 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.

⭐ 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!