As the famous phrase by statistician William Edwards Deming says, “you can't manage what you don't measure”. When it comes to digital marketing, measuring the results of campaigns and understanding the behavior of visitors to your site is essential.
After all, nowadays, any decision making and the definition of marketing budgets are directly conditioned by the analysis of these data.
The concern with understanding the behavior of users within a website or application is so great that it is possible to find a huge variety of web analytics tools available out there.
There are super complete analysis tools like Adobe Analytics and Mixpanel, free applications to generate heat maps like Hotjar and Crazyegg and even open source software that can be installed on your own server like Matomo (formerly PWIKI) and Open Web Analytics. Each of these applications has positive points and specific features, but without a doubt, Google Analytics is the most complete tool you will find.
Google Analytics is free, has a friendly interface, easy to integrate with other Google products, extremely high data processing capacity and allows you to extract customized reports for different needs. From the most basic analyzes to the most complex reports.
In this article, we’ll share some basic tips and interesting reports so you can take your analysis to the next level!
How to install Google Analytics
First of all, the first step in starting to analyze and measure user interactions on your site, is to install the tracking code on all pages of your domain.
To perform the initial configuration of Google Analytics we recommend that you use some tutorial or detailed instructions on how to implement the code according to your degree of knowledge, platform or language used in the programming of your website.
In all cases, regardless of the alternative chosen, you will need to have an active GA (Google Analytics) Account, a configured Property and obtain the Google Analytics Tracking Code, which we will call UA.
Accounts, Properties and Views
Before starting any analysis within Google Analytics you need to understand how the organization of the tool occurs within the 3 hierarchical levels of one:
account;
property;
property visits.
Account
Setting up an account is where it all starts. At this higher level of the Google Analytics organization, you can manage users, define privacy policy conditions and, above all, create properties.
Each Google user can create / manage up to 100 different accounts. In the case of an advertising agency, for example, you can create a different account for each customer served.
properties
Properties, as the name implies, can be represented by websites or mobile applications that you want to monitor.
At the property level, you have access to your Tracking Code (UA), define the default address of your website (domain URL) and also manage to define some standards for data collection. How long a session lasts, create custom dimensions and link other Google services to your account (Adwords, Adsense, Search Console), for example.
Each account in Google Analytics can have up to 50 properties. That is, up to 50 Tracking Codes (UA) to monitor traffic within each account.