Google Analytics is one of the top tools out there for analyzing traffic on your website. With a little bit of setup, it will give you an enormous amount of information about who is coming to your site, what they're looking for, and how they're getting there. In fact, it has so much information that it can be overwhelming! Don't let it scare you away!
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring all aspects of your websites traffic, from referrals to search engine activity. And like any application designed to do so much, Google Analytics comes with a rather steep learning curve, which can be intimidating at first.
In this article I'm going to take you from creating your account to actually using it... so lets get started.
Step 1: Set up your account
Go to the Google Analytics website and either sign-in using an existing Google Account or register a new one.
Once signed in you will have the ability to enter your websites details and some contact information. Do this.
After all the information is entered and you have completed the sign-up process Google will give you some HTML code to insert into your website. You don't need all of this code with EasyWebstore.
All you need is the number that starts with "UA-" and it will normally look something like "UA-1234567-1". Just write it down somewhere as you'll need it in the next step.
Since Google are constantly making improvements and changes to their user interface for Analytics it would be futile for me to give exact directions to things within the GA panel. However before logging out take a look around and find the ability to edit your site profile.
Once there you should see a big grey area with an "Edit" link at the top right. Click it.
On the next page find the option "E-Commerce Website". Set this to "Yes" and save the changes.
This ensures that your Analytics account will receive ecommerce conversion and transaction data from your EasyWebstore.
Step 2: Validating your site
Google will at some point in the registration process require you to validate that you actually own or control the site you are trying to track data for.
They will provide you with a meta tag that will look something like: <meta name="google-site-verification" content="sdfiuyg3478fgjsd734htfgi478ytiwu3f874yfg9whi478r" />
Copy the whole tag from the Google page and go to your EasyWebstore admin panel. Click "Content" -> "Display Settings" and then paste the whole tag into the big text box at the bottom of the page labelled HTML code to place in page header area.
Click "Update General Settings" and this will be saved and live on your store for Google to verify.
Step 3: Enabling Google Analytics on your store
You must tell the EasyWebstore system that you are using Google Analytics in order for it to send conversion and ecommerce data to your Google Analytics account.
Scroll down the page to "Google Analytics integration" and enter the UA number in the box labelled "UA-" (you only need the bit following "UA-" in the text box)
Click Update
Your store will now begin sending data to your Google Analytics account as people visit it.
Step 3: Viewing and using the data
After a while of letting your store send data to Google (2-4 weeks gives a good starting point) you will likely want to take a look at that data. Log into Google Analytics and click on "View Reports" for the site in question.
You will see a huge amount of data shown in various lists and graphs on the first page. This is your dashboard. From here you can drill-down into even more detail if needed.
The video below covers in detail all of the useful features within Google Analytics.
Google Analytics Interface Tutorial
Thank you for reading The EasyWebstore Support Team
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