How to Know / Check / track visitors to a website : Google Analytics Setup

This tutorial will tall you a way to know and track visitors to your website or a blog. If you are finding it difficult to setup a tool and you are asking yourself about how much traffic my website is getting, don’t worry. Just this quick article will guide you to Track Number of Visitors coming to your site/blog/website. This will also allow you to check the real time results and the collaborated data analysis as well.

Suggested Read: How to Choose the best WordPress theme for better web performance.

When i personally started blogging i wanted to know how many people visit my site. More and more visitors on blog will motivate you to work even more. I can understand how genuine this query is?

It does not matter, how many visitors you are getting in a day. It could be 100 or it could be 1000000. The single tracking tool will solve your purpose.

You can track any website or any blog with this Stepwise guide.

The way to track number of visitors coming to your site is easy and is by Google. So, blindly you can rely on the data. The toolkit is Google Analytics.

What is the Best Method to track how much traffic website is getting

There are many service providers. The list is so big that i can not count it on numbers. But if i have to tell the big names providing the visitor tracking service, i should mention the names of:

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bing
• Facebook
• Alexa
• Jetpack

Out of these name, i and almost 90% of the bloggers worldwide blindly trust the google. Google gives the service of web traffic statistics with the service of Google Analytics. With this, when you sign up for the user account, google provides you a code which you can integrate in your website. Rest all is taken care by google. I will explain this below.

The other service providers are good but they are not as good as Google Analytics. They are used by the website owners who are specifically targeting their parent organisation. For eg, the website marketing team just seeking for the visitors from Facebook relies on Facebook tools of traffic management.

Also Read: How can you create a Free Blog for yourself and start earning.

How to Setup Google Analytics Account to track visitors to a website

Now the question arises, how can you integrate the Google Analytics that will assist you to keep a website traffic record. By the way, Setting up Google Analytics is easy. Let’s start the guide with setting up Google Analytics account for your WordPress blog. You can repeat the same process for any website too.

Create the Free Account on Google Analytics and setup the basic interface

The very first thing that you have to do is that you have to create your Free Account on Google Analytics. If you are doing this for your first website, you need to

• Go to Google Analytics page and login using your Google account or create an account which is free. But, if you have it already, you can simply login to your account to access the interface.
• After you have your account active, you need to enter your blog / website information for which you wish to track the visitors.
• For the first time setup, you will be asked to add your website details and your personal details to get started. If you are someone who already has an account, click on Admin tab at the bottom left > select account and click on add a new property.

  

• On the next page, you need to add your website details to get the tracking code. Here is a sample screenshot from one website:

  

• Click on Get Tracking ID and you will be moved to the page with tracking ID for your website.

  

So far you had successfully setup your Google Analytics account and created the tracking ID for your website.

Now the most interesting part of this tutorial begins; as you need to integrate Google Analytics tracking ID into your WordPress blog. Let’s have a look at it into next section.

Add The Google Analytics Code to your Website

After you are given a piece of code by Google (as shown above), you have to embed that into your website. For doing this, There are multiple ways to add Google Analytics (GA) into your blog, and depending upon your level of blogging you should pick one of the below-mentioned methods. I’m putting down the different methods based on my recommended methods

• Option A) Using your WordPress theme:
  

  Many of you might not beware of the fact that most of the WordPress theme have an option to add header and footer script. You can use this to add GA tracking code into your blog.

  Simply copy the tracking code which you obtained in the above step, and go to theme setting option, look for the option to add footer script and paste the code.

  If you are not using wordpress, just add the copied code in between your body tags of HTML file.

  It will work seamlessly, and moreover you don’t have to rely on another plugin for the simple task. The below screenshot is from popular Genesis theme framework.

  

• Option B: Using Google Analytics for WordPress pluginThere are many plugins which are available in WordPress Plugin repo to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, but Google Analytics plugin by Monsterinsights is the most popular one. All you need to do is to install GA for WordPress plugin from official repo (plugin link)  or you can get the pro version that adds advanced features.
  Once you have activated the plugin, you will see a popup asking to allow or disallow tracking, which I prefer to select “Do not allow tracking.”
  Go to Settings > Google Analytics to configure the plugin and click on click here to authenticate with Google or you can also select manually enter the UA code.

  

Once you have done the authentication part,  I recommend you to use the official login of Google Analytics. Just select the created property and you can get the details and Track Number of Visitors Coming to your site.

Start Tracking the Visitors Now

When you have successfully added the code, you can login to your analytics account and go to the property ID which you created in the first step. This will let your analyse the web traffic your blog is getting.

You can analyse it and modify your blog accordingly. This will also let you explore the keywords which are making the blog to get the web traffic.

Y0u can add another admin for your Google Analytics account.

To do that:

1. Click Admin at the top of your screen and Select User Management under the left-hand Account menu.
2. Now In the “Add permission for:” field, fill out the email address.
3. Give the access by ticking / unticking the checkboxes and also Check ‘notify this user by email’
4. Click the Add button.
5. That’s it.

This will let your partners or somebody you trust to manage and check the details using their google accounts. You can control the access permission as well. This is very beneficial as it solves the purpose without sharing your account details.

Benefits of Using Google Analytics

You can get the real time traffic reports. There are many more interesting features with Google Analytics. The best thing is everything is free. You just need to explore the Layout.

1. The Google Analytics is completely free to use.
2. You can easily get the traffic acquisition details.
3. It makes it possible to identify which pages and links your visitors click the most.

Using Google Analytics To Track and Analyse the Visitor statistics who are visiting a Website

There are lot more things available in the Google Analytics section. The important things that you should stress upon are under the site behavior. Almost every term will be known to you, but the most important keyword that you will encounter will be Bounce Rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

First let us understand what this terminology is. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visit a website and exit without checking any other pages on your website. Meaning to say, If you’re average bounce rate, for example, is 75%, this means that 75% of the people who come to your website leave after only viewing the page they entered on, whether it was your homepage or an internal page.

You can access the Bounce rate of your website In your Analytics dashboard. This will let you analyse on an overview level and page level as well.

To check the Bounce rate on an overview level:

• Click on the “Acquisition” tab and then the “Overview” sub-tab.
  

  

  As you can see in the screenshot the bounce rate is visible for the type of traffic source. But if you wish to see the Bounce rate for the individual page levels, you can explore the following sub tabs.

• Click on the “Acquisition” tab and then you can explore the subdivisions. For eg, you can check for referral traffics. This will show you all of your referral traffic and you can see the bounce rate from each. In the example below you will see that the bounce rate is very good across the board, but there can always be improvements, so we would want to look into the traffic source that was producing the 26% bounce rate and see if we can do anything to improve the user experience for that source.

If you are having it between 25-30% it is very good. But if you are having it something greater than 80%, you should start working on your blog content.

Which articles are driving the traffic and which are not?

This information tells you the interest region of your audience. Suppose you write a very good article but that does not get you the traffic, so it is no point on wasting time on such articles. To know the details about which articles are getting the visitors: Click on the “Behavior” tab, followed by “Site Content” and then “All Pages” to display your most popular pages.

You can Use this data to help identify potential for future blog posts and topics. For instance, if you notice that your list posts or how-to posts attract the most interest then continue to publish content structured the same way.

What are the Landing Pages and how it determines your website performance?

The webpages on which your traffic directly visits are the landing pages. If the blog / site has only one or two landing pages which are performing exceptionally well, you can use the internal links on those pages. This will let the visitors know about other interesting articles on your website which in turn will decrease the bounce rate and will increase your site performance.

Setting of Goals in Analytics to track visitors to a website

The Goals in Google Analytics allows users to track specific user interactions on any website. These user interactions can be anything including form submissions, button clicks, ebook downloads, and more. basically, it tells the owner if a group of visitor is interacting and using the blog / site in a dedicated desired manner or not.

Types of Google Analytics goals

• Destination Goal: You can choose this goal type if you want to treat a pageview or screenview as a conversion.
• Duration Goal: You can measure user engagement by treating time spent on a page as a conversion.
• Pages/Screens per session Goal: This is another way to measure user engagement. You can measure the number of pageviews per session as a conversion.
• Event Goal: You can treat user interaction like button click, video play, ebook download as a conversion.

Suppose you wish to track the number of people clicking a particular sign up button, it will be possible with the Google Analytics Goal settings. You can create a new goal in google analytics from – Admin > Goals > New Goal.

Analysing the Audience Demography

Google Analytics is very powerful for analysing the visitor locations and behavior. You can get the details and analyse them very easily.

To check the basics overview of the demography:

• In the Reporting tab, navigate to Audience > Demographics > Overview.

This also gives their language information. Meaning, you can get to know in which language they searched and viewed your website.

To check the Visitor Location with Google Analytics

• Head to Audience > Geo > Location.

This useful map provides a graphical view of reader locations. Scroll down and you’ll see a box that goes into more detail:

Getting the knowhow of the Traffic Sources for the visitors coming to your website

When you have your blog / site active, the information of the traffic sources is very important. This lets you analyse if you are putting efforts, is that really effective.

Suppose you are spending on advertisements to drive the traffic but that is not getting the traffic for you, so it is of no use. Google analytics lets you track this information very minutely and precisely.

To check that:

• In the left-hand column, click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Sources.

Scroll down to the table and you’ll see the sites that are sending traffic to your site.

Wrapping Up

You can track visitors to a website using Google Analytics . This lets you explore in details and is free of cost.

When i personally started using it, i did not explore all of the available options. I just used to see the real time traffic and traffic coming all over the day. But the options available with it made me improve the website.

I can assure that this 10-minute task will help you get more from your google analytics, even if you’re brand new to using it or a GA-savvy marketer who just wants to extract the most useful data.

Analytics are important, but you shouldn’t be spending more time on them than you have to. Track it daily but not majorly.

Share this article if you like it.

Do you use any other Analytics tool. What is your way of tracking visitors coming to your website?