Google Analytics configuration – how to do it properly?

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool started by google to track websites or platforms by collecting data from your website. Google Analytics is a basic tool to analyze your website that offers statistics and tools for marketing and SEarch engine. It collects your website data to understand and provide you with results on how web users interact with your website. For instance, if you are an eCommerce platform selling cosmetic products, Google Analytics can help you determine the number of visitors you receive, how they reach your website and more.

How does Google Analytics work?

The working mechanism of Google analytics is as follows:

• When you use Google Analytics for your website, Google Analytics puts tracking code in between your website code. When a web user interacts or visits your website, they track user activity including age, interest, and other information.
• This information is then transferred and recorded in the server when the user exits your website. When you want to know information or data, Google will collect and aggregate all the data 4 levels – page visit, individual visit, action by the user, and all events including video views or button clicks, etc.

Why do you need Google analytics configuration?

Google Analytics is one of the most useful tools offered by Google for real-time tracking and analysis. Often businesses underuse Google analytics, the tool can help you measure the result of campaigns, compare data from various previous periods, customer engagement, conversion tracking, device overview, etc. Google Analytics helps you track all crucial metrics of your website that can help you improve performance. The statistics of various campaigns, how visitors or users interact with your platform can be identified effectively and can be used to understand more about your customers. A better understanding of your customers will help you make better decisions for improving your marketing and website in many ways.

What are the main settings in Google Analytics?

Google analytics has various setting options available to change the default setup according to your website requirement. To work on setting first you need to know how to configure google analytics– first, you need to create your account on Google analytics and follow instructions given by Google to set up an account. After you have created an account you need to fix the main settings in Google Analytics for optimum use. These settings include site search settings, data sharing settings, view settings, and property settings.

Google Analytics configuration for view settings

You will start with view settings from the admin section and select view settings. In view settings, you will have to update the following data –

View ID – It’s not a setting, but it can help you in API or third-party tools so know your view ID.

View Name – You need to set up view names, but make sure it doesn’t match your property setting name. Set up at least three view names, one for everyone, the second that contains some filters, and the third for testing purposes or to try new settings.

Website URL – paste URL of your website, it has been the home page URL.

Time Zone – Set up a time zone where your target audience is located.

Exclude URL query parameter – if your website uses query parameters it can be useful, exclude all the links that don’t link to actual page content.

Currency – Set up your local currency.

Exclude bots and spiders – Google will restrict or exclude traffic from bots or spider sites listed in IAB.

Configuring Site search settings

You need to set up site search settings if you have a search option on your website. It will help your visitors to take advantage of search functions on your platform. Enable site search tracking and insert query parameters in case you are using a defined search term, if you use a complex search function enable site search categories and fill the information.

Google Analytics configuration for property setting

To begin, click on Admin and then navigate to create the property section.

You will need all the details of your website and choose the property type. It’s better to use universal Analytics or the G4 property.

To use the G4 property, After you select the property type, fill in necessary details and move to next for business information and click next, select web and put your URL and click create a stream. Your G4 property is created.

How to add Google Analytics tracking code on your website?

Ecommerce data or transaction tracking is a feature provided by Google Analytics to help eCommerce websites in tracking data such as Average order value, number of orders, billing, sales amount, etc. This type of tracking information when analyzed with Google analytics information can help you analyze how your landing page or marketing campaigns are performing. Before analyzing transaction tracking of your website, you need to paste the tracking code provided by Google Analytics on your website for Configuring Google Analytics transaction feature –

Step – 1 You need to set up your Google Analytics, if you already have, you just have to log in. Once the account is created, navigate to the main Analytics page.

Step – 2 on the left-hand side of the page, you will see the admin link, click on that link.

Step – 3 On the admin link, there is a drop-down menu, click on the Property column of the menu then click on tracking info in the list.

Step – 4 In tracking info, you will see option tracking code, click tracking code option. A window or information section with the name Website tracking will appear on the right & center of the page. You will see code written inside a box. Copy the tracking code provided by Google Analytics.

Step – 5 Now move to your website code, and paste the tracking code in <head>…. </head> section of your website code. If your website code is based on template files or CSS, you need to paste code in the header template or header file.

How to add transactions (eCommerce data) tracking to Google Analytics?

After Pasting the tracking code, you need to enable transaction features on your platform to make your tracking code work. To add transaction tracking feature for Configuring Google Analytics, you can follow these simple steps to enable the tracking feature of Google Analytics:

Step – 1 Navigate back to Google analytics and move to the real-time section on the left panel and click on overview in the real-time section. When you click on the overview, Google will provide the number of active users on your website, if you don’t get the info, it means the tracking code is not pasted right or eCommerce is not enabled.

Step – 2 To enable eCommerce move to admin link click on eCommerce settings and enable, save. Then check your overview again if it’s working.

Google Analytics will not be able to view your website transactions and visitor interactions. However, you will not be able to see your transaction data as you need script code for tracking. Ask your developer to add a server script in tracking code provided by Google analytics to start getting reports. If you have a WordPress website, you can use a plugin to access the information, you just have to use eCommerce add ons and then enable eCommerce tracking in the above-stated steps.

What's the difference between Universal Analytics (UA) and GA 4 and which to choose

Universal Analytics and GA4 are both property types used in Google Analytics settings. Often we have seen people recommending these two settings for google analytics configuration, but what is the difference between both and which one you can choose? Let’s find out more:

The difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics

According to Google, GA4 is more customer-centric compared to UA, as it provides customer-centric measurement based on events and parameters. Marketers can easily use this information to understand how customers are interacting with the website. Customer-centric information always provides better insights and helps in decision-making. UA on the other hand uses a measure model based on pageviews and sessions.

Earlier, integrating Google Bigquery was difficult for websites as this feature was only available to the paid version, now GA4 offers free access to all for bigQuery integration.

UA uses variable settings and requires edit permissions and various setups for configuring Google analytics with Google tag manager for cross-domain tracking. However, in GA4 this setup is direct.

Universal analytics used to have a monthly 10m limit for hits in the free version, but now the feature has been changed while in GA4, there is no limit for the volume of hits you can collect.

These are some significant differences in GA4 and universal Analytics, due to more useful features in the free version of GA4 many people use GA4 more than universal Analytics. However, before you put your trust in any of these, learn about the type of features your website might require for data collection.

Conclusion

This guide will help you in configuring google analytics in detail. You can follow these steps to set up your account and use various features. However, the use of features will be depending on the type of website you have. For example, services or blogging websites will not require transaction tracking. Similarly, you need to understand what your website needs, and then select the features. If you are working with WordPress websites, a few plugins with these above-stated settings, you can start your website analysis.