How to Sign up to Google Analytics

The purpose of this post is to give you a step by step guide on how to sign up to Google analytics. I don’t need to tell you how critically important it is to have analytics on your site, it’s a 100% must have for any businesses looking to make an return on investment from their online efforts.

This is quick and easy to do and shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. OK, I’m going to time you…Ready…Set…GO!

Step-1: Create a Google Account

If you already have a Google Account you can skip this step and move straight on to Step 2. For those of you who don’t have one, you will need a regular Google account to sign up for analytics. If you don’t already have a gmail or other google account then you will need to go here and click the “create an account” option as seen below:

Once you click “create an account” you will be brought to the page that can be seen in the image below. It’s here you need to create your Google account.

Click on the red “Sign up” that the green arrow is pointing to.

After you have clicked sign up you’re brought to a page that asks for your details. This requires you to enter your email address and select a password you want to use. Once you have submitted your details you have to confirm your email address so log in to your email and you should have received an email from Google.

All you have to do is hit confirm and go back to the page that appeared after you submitted your details. This page thanks you for creating an account so just scroll down to the end of the page and click “continue”. The page below will appear;

Step-2: Sign up for Analytics

Now that you have a Google account you need to sign up to analytics. Click the sign up button on the right hand side of the page as can be seen in the image above.

This brings you to a page that requires you to enter some website details and create an account name. Don’t worry, not long left to go.

Once you’ve agreed to the terms of service click accept and you’ll be at the final page of the sign up process. Scroll halfway down the page and you’ll find a box full of code like the one seen in the image below.

Step-3: Inserting the Analytics Code into your website

Okay there are two ways you can go about putting this on your WordPress website. The first is to do it yourself which is very straight forward, even if you have no knowledge of HTML. First copy the code in the section of your Google Analytics account that looks similar to the image above. Then log in to your WordPress Admin Dashboard. In the left menu select Appearance>Editor.

On the screen that loads you will see a main content box with a bunch of code in it. To the right of that you will see a list of all the files in your website that you are able to edit manually. Look for one with the word header in the filename and click it. The contents of the main box to the left of the list you’ve just clicked will update. The main content box is now showing you the code of your header file.

Search the contents of the header file for the closing head tag which looks like this: </head>

When you find it, simply click in front of it and hold ctrl + v to paste in the code you got from Google Analytics. Click the blue “update file” button underneath the box you’ve just edited, and Hey Presto, the tracking code has been added to all of the pages in your website.

The other way you can go about adding the tracking code, if you really don’t feel comfortable messing with your website, (or if you are not using WordPress) is to get in touch with whoever built your website and have them put it on every page you want to track. They may charge you a fee but at least you will have peace of mind that it is done correctly.

OK, so that’s it. Not as daunting as it may have previously seemed, right? Now you’re ready to track, analyse and improve how you operate online. At the start of this post I said I’d time how long it took you to get signed up and you’ll be delighted to know that it took me 8 minutes. For the time and financial costs involved, I hope you’ll agree that implementing Google Analytics is an absolute no brainer.

Have you signed up for Google Analytics yet?