Online advertising of your products and services is without a doubt the best way to bring them as close as possible to your potential customers. In order to create good ads, you need to know what people visit your site and how they behave. Google Analytics can help here a lot.
Google Analytics is a free service that collects visitor data and activity on your site. From these data, it produces reports and statistics to help you customize your website and advertising. In this article, you’ll learn how to create an account and set up basic settings.
Create an account and set up property
You can sign in to Google Analytics with your Google (Gmail) account or create a new one with a different email address.
It should match the one you used in Google Ads. Once you create your account, you’ll need to set up property first. This means adding a web address where you offer your services or products. You will do this in the “Admin” section. Based on your property, you get your tracking ID that is specific to each site. This code is then required to be added to your website to collect data to create reports from. You can find detailed instructions on how to do this directly in Analytics Help.
Basic settings
Another basic step before you start using the service is to set up reporting views. Views allow you to create exactly the reports you need. You can set many of them as you want to and customize them to show specific data relevant for you. One such setting is, for example, filtering your IP address to avoid it in statistics. We suppose you don´t want your activity to be included in the overall report.
Like Google Ads, you can share your Google Analytics account with others without giving you’re your password. You can also find user management in the “Admin” section. You invite them via email addresses and manage their account competences.
Google Analytics is also an app, that you can download to keep your reports under thumb. You can also be informed about the activity via email. Just set your own alerts in the “Admin” section.
For advanced Google Analytics settings (especially report views), we’ve created a short guide to all the features you can use in the service:
If you prefer to see this guide in video version, check out our YouTube video.
If you are just starting with online advertising, continue with the article on how to create a Google Merchant Center account that is important for advertising your products.
