Installing and configuring the google analytics counter. Proper setup of Google Analytics. Gathering an audience for remarketing

21.05.2020

We updated this material in the summer of 2019. Enjoy reading!

Google Analytics is a web analytics service from Google, with which users can get statistics about site visitors and their actions on the conversion path for free. Working with it begins with installing the Google Analytics counter on the site. In this manual, we have described the steps for setting up and installing the meter.

1. Create a resource

You need to add the resource you plan to analyze to your Google Analytics account.

As a resource, you can choose website or mobile app . This instruction describes how to install the Google Analytics counter on the site.
Account name. In the Google Analytics hierarchy, an account occupies the top level. It can include 50 or more resources, below which are views. A convenient name for the account is the name of the company.
Fill in the fields Name of the site and Website URL. Select protocol prefix http:// or https://.
Select Industry from the proposed list, it should correspond to the field of activity of your organization. If there is no suitable one, you can specify the closest one to your industry.
Select Timezone, which contains the audience of your site.
Check the boxes for privacy and data access settings.
Click the button Get tracking ID and the system will prompt you to read and accept the terms of use of the service - specify the country correctly and save.

2. Resource setup

Once you've created a tracking counter for a resource, the system will direct you to a page where you can manage the resource's settings. Let's consider the main ones.

The tracking ID and tracking code are available on the page - they are needed to add the Google Analytics counter to the site.

But before that, you need to make a few more settings.

In the section turn on features for advertisers:

Remarketing— the function activates remarketing lists.

AT Resource settings a few more options need to be enabled: demographic reporting and improved link attribution.

If you enable the option, it will replace "Remarketing and features for advertisers" once you enable it.

Once enabled, additional user data and cross-device reporting will also appear in your account.

3. View settings

In this section, you can customize an existing view or create a new one.

Be sure to check if the field is filled "Currency". The currency setting is required to set up goals and track Ecommerce.

Make sure you check the box next to . So, the system will exclude sessions made by robots.

4. Setting the tracking code

After that, you need to return to the account level and copy the tracking code. It can be installed on the site in two ways:

Add a global tag to the site's source code after the opening tag on every page. The higher the counter code is placed, the better.
You can outsource this task to the developers or install it yourself.
FROM Google Tag manager. detailed instructions for installation - in our .

Google Analytics is free service for webmasters, which allows you to collect and analyze site traffic statistics, as well as data about visitors.

The information is collected by the Google Analytics counter - a small script placed on the pages of the site under study.

With Google Analytics you can track:

where visitors come to the site from search engines(and by what request), by mailing, by links from other web resources, from social networks, directly - by typing the site's URL in the address bar of the browser and in other ways;
what pages the visitor went to, how long they stayed on them and what they did (what they viewed, where they clicked, what products they added to the cart, etc.);
what materials visitors recommend to friends using social media buttons;
geographic location of visitors (by IP address);
parameters of devices from which users access the site (mobile gadget or computer, with what screen resolution);
operating system version;

In addition, Google Analytics sends cookies to the browser to identify the visitor each time they visit the site.

Thanks to the service, you will know:

how many users visited the site for a certain period of time;
what sources bring you the most visitors;
Residents of which regions have your site most popular;
which pages are the least popular and why visitors leave them;
whether users perform the actions you need (purchases, orders, registration, etc.).

Registration

To start using Google Analytics, you need to register on the service and a Google account. Open the main page of the resource and click "Register".

Enter your password, username of your account and click the "Register" button again.

After you sign in to Google Analytics for the first time, enter:

what do you want to track - website or mobile application;
tracking method (default is Universal Analytics);
the name and address of the site;
industry (subject) of the site;
time and timezone.

In settings sharing put a checkmark next to the items you need. After that, click "Get Tracking ID".

After accepting the license agreement, your account will be created.

Setting

Note! After registration, you will be issued a unique identifier and tracking code, which must be placed on all significant pages of your site. After that, the collection of statistics will begin.

How to add a Google Analytics tracking code to a website?

Method 1.

Copy the tracking code between the tags.
Paste it into the page code between the tags . The place of insertion does not matter much.
Save your changes.

Method 2.

Copy the tracking ID UA-*.
Go to your site settings.
Open the counter management section and find the field to insert your Google Analytics ID.
Paste and save your changes.

Interface Overview

Main page

On the home page service displays a list of connected websites and basic statistics on them:

sessions;
average session duration;
failures;
goal conversion rate (the ratio of the number of visitors who completed the actions you need on the site to the total number of visitors).

Note! Under the name of each resource is the button "All site data". By clicking on it, you will be redirected to the "Reports" page - to the section of detailed statistics.

Reports

By clicking in the side menu "Summary", you will be taken to where all the summary reports of attendance are collected. You can customize the type of reports yourself.

You can also delete unnecessary bulletins and create new ones.

You can create shortcuts for quick access to the most important reports.

In addition, any report can be sent by e-mail, exported to PDF format and show to other users.

If you need current site statistics, click the "Live" button in the sidebar. The data on this tab can be tracked by the minute.

Note! The "Real-time" subsection allows you to view all statistics at once or only one of its types - the location of visitors, traffic sources (where visitors came from), events, content and conversion.

Subsection « The audience” will tell you which users come to your site. The data is provided in great detail, down to gender, age and interests of people.

From here you will also find out from what device visitors come to you, how often they return and how much they are interested in your site (how much time they spend on it, how many pages they open).

Subsection « Traffic sources» provides the most detailed information from where and for what requests visitors come.

To track their journey from search engines, as well as the conversion of your goals, you need to link your Google Analytics and AdWords account.

This will allow you to view AdWords reports from the Google Analytics interface and vice versa - import Analytics data into your AdWords account.

To link your AdWords account to Google Analytics, enter the subsection of the same name, click "Get Started" in the right part of the window and follow the instructions.

Subsection « Behavior»displays information about user interaction with the content of the site. The statistics collected here allow you to evaluate the availability and usefulness of your materials.

And the last subsection Conversions» will tell you how many visitors perform actions that are valuable to you, such as buying products.

The target type must first be configured in the "Administrator" section.

Setting

Google Analytics page « Setting» is designed to manage summaries. Here you can view them, divide them into categories and import them from the gallery.

Administrator

Page " Administrator» contains settings account and statistics management tools. It is divided into three sections: "Account", "Resource" and "View".

Tools section « Account»Allow you to set filters for viewing data in Google Analytics and control access to your statistics for other users.

Chapter " Resource" contains tools for managing the settings of connected sites and means of communication with other Google products - AdWords, AdSense, Webmaster Tools and others.

SEO buttons are also located here - remarketing, data import from other platforms and settings for obtaining statistics from social networks.

In chapter " Performance» collected tools fine tuning collecting statistics: creating goals for assessing the conversion of visitors, segments to receive detailed information about a certain group of users, annotations to reports.

And also - setting up alerts, mailing lists, labels, filters, e-commerce and much more.

Google Analytics: setup and installation

How to install and configure Google Analytics (Google Analytics) - complete instructions

Google Analytics is a very advanced web analytics tool, that's why google setting Analytics must be performed at the highest level. Of course, if you want to track the maximum indicators and calculate your advertising budget, and not waste money on advertising for nothing.

Preparation of basic reports

Let's finish this topic by compiling basic reports in Google Analytics.

Traffic sources

Go to the "Traffic Source" section and click "Source / Channel". Here you can see from where visitors come to our resource.

At the top of this tab, you can export the data for the report in various formats.

Conversions

To see how many conversions you are getting, go to the "Conversions" section and select "Overview". Then, in the achieved goals, you need to select the goal for which we want to get statistics. This report, as well as the previous one, can be downloaded in any of the convenient formats.

Before creating an account in Google Analytics, let's understand its structure.

Account is the access point to GA, the top level of the hierarchy. One account can contain one or more resources. You can have several accounts, for example, personal and corporate with access for your colleagues.

resource can be a website, mobile app, or device (such as a kiosk or point of sale). When you add a property to your account, GA generates a tracking code that is required to collect data for the property.

Performance is a set of data about a resource. A resource can have multiple representations, for example:

View with all the data on the site.
The view that contains only sessions with the source - AdWords.
A view with traffic-only data for subdomain. A domain that is part of a domain over high level. For example, mail.example.com is a subdomain of example.com, which in turn is a subdomain of.com

Schematically, the structure of the account can be depicted as follows:

Now you can proceed to register in Google Analytics.

Step 1. Create an account

1. Set up the first view

In the admin panel, section "View" - "View settings":

Set the presentation currency to be displayed in reports. If you accept multiple currencies, Google Analytics will convert them to the presentation currency at the previous day's exchange rate. More details in the help.
Enable bot filtering so that their visits to the site do not distort traffic statistics.
Turn on tracking search queries on the site if you want to know what your visitors are looking for. More details in the help.

2. Create Additional Views

For free version Google Analytics can set up 25 views. We recommend creating 3 main views to start with:

Working. Unlike the first view, this one uses filters to exclude unwanted traffic from reports (for example, from home or corporate intranet Internal private network organizations)
UserID. Shows data only for those users who are logged into your site. Read more about the UserID view in the help.
Test. Helps to check the functionality from the test subdomains of the site.

To quickly set up any of these views, go to View > View Settings, select All Data To Website, and click Copy View. Next, rename it and add filters. Filters help you exclude internal traffic from reports, track activity in a particular directory, track subdomains in separate views, and so on.

Let's see how to exclude internal traffic so that the actions of your employees on the site do not fall into the statistics and do not distort it. To do this, in the "Views" - "Filters" menu, select the required view, click "Add Filter" and configure it:

Enter a name, such as IP filter.
In the Filter Type field, select Inline.
Select "Exclude" from the "Select Filter Type" drop-down menu.
In the "Select a source or target" menu, use the "Traffic from IP addresses" option.
In the "Select an expression" menu, select the one you want. For example, to exclude a single IP address, select "Identical", exclude a subnet from IP addresses like 192.168.0.* - "Starting with".
Enter an IP address or regular expression.

3. Add goals

The goal can be any user action beneficial to you on the site. Why set goals? To understand which source, campaign, ad, keyword brought the sale. Properly chosen goals allow you to get important information about conversions. Without this information, it is almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of online business and marketing campaigns.

Goals are divided into 4 types:

landing page. For example, when a user visits the "Contacts" page.
duration. For example, the user has been on the support page for more than 15 minutes.
Pages/screens per session. For example, the user visited at least 3 pages of the site.
Event. Any user action with content on the site. For example, watching a video, filling out a registration form, etc. More details in the help.

Let's look at an example of how to set up a goal - clicking on the "Subscribe" button for a newsletter. In the "View" - "Goals" menu, click the "+ Goal" button and select the "Custom" template. Then we come up with a name, for example, "Subscribe" and select the type of goal "Event":

In the details of the goal, you need to specify its conditions. The first two "Category" and "Action" are required parameters. Here it is desirable to enter words by which you can understand what your goal is. For example, a category could be called "Subscribe" and the action would be "Click".

The "Label" and "Value" parameters are filled in at your discretion. Labels provide Additional information for events, such as the name of a button, video, or file to upload.

Each visitor action on the site can be assigned a monetary value. It is calculated individually. For example, 20% of your guests subscribed to the newsletter and made a purchase, and the average transaction amount is 10,000 rubles. This means that the “Subscription” goal can be estimated at 2,000 rubles (that is, 20% of 10,000 rubles). On the other hand, if only 1% of subscriptions lead to sales, you can specify a value of 200 rubles.

Done - you've set up a goal. Now you need to paste the event code into the code of the button you are going to track.

The standard code for setting goals in GA looks like this:
ga("send", "event", , , , , );

We filled in only two conditions, so we will simplify the code to this:
ga("send", "event", , );
where:

ga("send", "event", ...); The part that doesn't change.
eventCategory and eventAction are the name of our category and action, respectively.

As a result, the event code will look like this:
ga("send", "event", "Subscribe", "Click");

It remains to insert this code into the code of the "Subscribe" button on your site.

Read more about goals in Google Analytics in the help, and how to create them -.

Resource settings

1. Eliminate unwanted traffic sources

If your site does not have a built-in payment system, the user goes to the site payment system and then comes back to you. Google Analytics considers transitions from payment systems as a new session. To exclude two sessions instead of one, add an exclusion in the menu "Resource" - "Tracking code" - "List of excluded referral sources".

2. Create custom parameters and indicators

If the standard parameters in Google Analytics for reports are not enough for you, you can create your own. For example, brand, category, username, user ID, purchase price, profit, etc.

Using custom parameters, you can divide visitors into individual groups and analyze their behavior. This segmentation helps to make the right decisions. For example, you can find out which filters are most often used for a certain category of products, and remove ineffective ones. Or immediately offer more relevant products using the default sorting or filters.

How are parameters different from indicators? Parameter - text value, the indicator is numeric. Those. the user's city is a parameter, and the number of page views is a metric.

To create a parameter, go to the menu "Resource" - "Custom definitions" - "Custom parameters". Specify the parameter name and level:

After confirming the settings, a code will appear. Embed it in the appropriate place source code your site or application:

Custom metrics are set up in the same way, and you need to select:

We are done with the basic Google Analytics settings. Now let's look at the advanced settings.

Step 3. Expand your reach in Google Analytics

View settings

1. Set up e-commerce

Collect and analyze data about purchases, transactions, average order value, time to purchase, and more with the ecommerce module.

Go to menu "Views" - "Ecommerce Settings" and confirm the following settings to use the module:

Now you can compare groups of channels with each other.

3. Set up alerts

Notifications help track deviations in key metrics. For example, you can set up an alert if the bounce rate exceeds 20% per day, so that you can respond to the problem in time.

To do this, go to the "View Settings" - "My Alerts" - "New Alert" menu and configure the alert:

When the bounce rate exceeds 20%, you will receive an email about it.

Resource settings

1. Linking Google Analytics to AdWords

If you have an AdWords account, link it to Google Analytics. Thanks to this, you will be able to:

Understand what percentage of your traffic and sales comes from AdWords.
Get more conversions for less. Importing goals and transactions from GA to AdWords will allow you to optimize your bids using the Conversion Optimizer.
Find out what people do after they click on your ad and land on your landing page. Analyze indicators bounce When the user viewed only one page or fired only one event, average duration of sessions, number of pages viewed per session, etc. This data shows how your campaigns are performing and helps you make decisions about budgets and ad copy. For example, due to the rating CTR The number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of impressions and the bounce rate for the ad group, you can understand how the site meets the expectations of users. More details in the help.
Increase the likelihood of conversion by showing ads to users based on their interests (games, pets, cars, etc.). To do this, create remarketing groups in GA and use them in AdWords for audience targeting (help) .

To link accounts, go to the menu "Resource" - "Link with Adwords", select the desired AdWords account and click "Continue". Select the views you want to import data into Google AdWords. Don't forget to confirm your settings:

Google sets up UTM tags for AdWords campaigns automatically. Read our guide to set up labels for other ad campaigns.

Now you can appreciate ROI ROI AdWords advertising campaigns in Google Analytics, menu "Traffic Sources" - "AdWords".

2. Import advertising costs

If, apart from AdWords, you use contextual advertising in Yandex and social networks, we recommend importing cost data on these sites into Google Analytics.

What will it give you? The ability to receive data quickly and in one service to analyze advertising costs, calculate income and ROI. At the same time, you can analyze both campaigns and individual ads and keywords.

To import expense data, in the menu "Resource" - "Import data" create a new data set and select "Expense data":

Specify the name of the data set and the view where the costs will be loaded:

Set the parameters and metrics you want to upload. We are interested in the advertising source and channel, as well as the cost of attracting a user. In the "Actions during import" field, it is better to leave "Summarization", otherwise new data will be written instead of existing data.

You have defined the expense data structure, now you need to import the data into GA. This can be done manually by creating a .csv file for import (read more in the help). However, this process is laborious and will take time to figure out.

You can save time and avoid mistakes by using the service for automatic download data. How to set up the service is described in the help.

Now you can combine data from different advertising services. As a result, you will receive reports that show a complete picture of user actions. This will help you make better marketing and business decisions.

Of course, in this article we have not covered all the features of Google Analytics. However, the described settings will be enough for a convenient and hassle-free start.

For the most patient (so much text to endure!) and inquisitive, we have a bonus — an example of setting up a custom funnel. Leave your email and we will send a file with an example of how to find pages, forms and buttons on the site that scare away customers.

P.S. If suddenly we missed something important, write about it in the comments and we will fix it.

P.P.S. If you need help setting up web analytics and metrics, then you

In this article I will talk about how to properly produce basic installation Google Analytics code to your website. If you already have this web analytics system installed, do not rush to close the page, it is quite possible that you will discover something new in this article. The fact is that the title is not in vain written about the setting for Runet. It is when working in Runet that the basic GA package has one limitation, which you can find out about only by digging through the reference materials. During registration, no one will tell you about it. At the same time, this limitation significantly affects the quality of the data obtained.

In this article, you will learn what this limitation is, and most importantly, how to get around it. I saw a lot of sites on RuNet with installed system Google Analytics, and only units had the html code correctly configured for Runet. And the Internet agency NextMedia even conducted a study on this topic, and came to the conclusion that only every tenth site in RuNet that uses Google Analytics sets it up correctly for full-fledged data collection.

Now, when registering a new account in Google Analytics, the system issues new version html code to be inserted into the site, the so-called asynchronous code. Its essence is that it can be loaded in parallel with the loading of the main content of the page, thereby not slowing it down. At the same time, on this moment, many users have Google Analytics installed previous version code (ga.js). Therefore, in this article, I will show my recommendations for setting up GA using both versions of the code as an example: asynchronous and regular.

Summary:
1) Registering an account in Google Analytics and getting an html code
2) Setting up a site profile in your account
3) Refinement of the html code (configuration for Runet and UAnet, tracking subdomains)
4) Installing the html code on the site + separate instructions for PHP sites, and blogs on WordPress, Blogger and Joomla.
So, let's begin:

Registering an account in Google Analytics and getting an html code

If you already have an account in any of Google services(GMail, AdWords, Adsense, etc.), then you do not need to register again. Only if you don't want to have a separate account for Google Analytics.

To register a new account or log in, go here:

Tell your friends about it, they might need it.