Ever wondered what your users are doing on your website and where they came from? Or maybe you are wondering how much they bought on your website?

Those questions are natural when you are managing a business that has a website. Fortunately for you, there is a tool out there that can answer those questions and many more, it’s called: Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google, it allows you to see where users are coming from, by source and medium (i.e. google / organic), how they interact with your website: average time per page, number of pages visited and can help you see how much they have bought*.

Out of the box GA (its abbreviation) comes with a lot of cool & useful reports that can help you better understand your users, how your website works and how you can improve it. 

In addition you also have the opportunity to create custom reports and set up custom features like dimension and metrics in order to tailor your GA to your website experience.

*In order to see any data about transactions and revenue you will need to activate Ecommerce Tracking or Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking and adjust your tracking implementation. This is not in the scope of this article, I will create a future one which will focus on this subject.

If you’ve already created your Google Analytics account and started playing with it you’ve most probably stumbled across GA4 mentions. 

Google Analytics 4 (or GA4 for short) is the latest version of GA available, until recently it was called Analytics Web + App. This article will cover only the implementation of Google Analytics Universal Analytics, not GA4.

If you want to find out more about GA4 and how to implement it you can read my article about it.

Prerequisites:

• Google Analytics ID (you need a Google Analytics account)
• Google Tag Manager

The video below takes you through the whole process step by step. Also, you can follow the steps below the video for an even more in-depth view.

The steps:

1. Log into your Google Analytics account
2. Navigate to Admin -> Tracking Info (under the property) -> Tracking code and get your Google Analytics ID
3. Log into Google Tag Manager and click New Tag
4. Give your tag a name (I suggest GA – Base Code)
5. Select “Google Analytics: Universal Analytics” as tag type, “Pageview” as track type and select your GA variable from the Google Analytics settings (if you don’t have one follow the next step)
6. Click the dropdown menu and select “New Variable…” give it a name (I would recommend GA – {insert your GA ID}), add your GA ID in the Tracking ID field and click Save
7. As Triggering add “All Pages” and click Save.
8. To deploy the changes live on your website click the “Submit” button, give the version a name and description and hit the Publish button

The Google Analytics code should be now live on your website. To check if everything is implemented properly, open two new tabs, one with your website and one with your Google Account, navigate to Real-time -> Overview report. 

The report should now show at least 1 active user on your website (you), or even more (it means that you are popular 😄).