Friday, December 5, 2008

Track your Website with Google Analytics

What can Google Analytics do for you?
Google analytics is an analytic tool for your website. This means you have launched a new website and you want to track the traffic, visitors, number of visitors viewing your pages, which pages of your website are viewed most by the visitors, which is the landing page of the website, the average time spent by visitors on your website. You can track all this information with the help of a single tool and that is Google Analytics. Google Analytics also helps you in generating and focusing you on your return over investment. You can find out how many visitors are following the right path and how many visits are actually converting into purchases over your website. It helps in tracking the sales and let you know from which sites and the links traffic is coming to your website.
Implementation of Google Analytics
The implementation of the Google Analytics is very easy and you just have to follow the systematic process guided by the Google Analytics itself. Just sign up for a Google account with your existing Google account or if you do not have a Google account create one with Gmail. Log in to your Google Analytics account after signing up at http://www.google.com/analytics. After logging in, they will ask the URL of your website. Enter your website URL and hit the continue button.
Google Analytics will provide you with a code, which is in the form of Javascript. Example of the code is as below
Example Code:


UA-xxxx-x, here xxxx-x will be replaced by Google Analytics as they will assign a unique tracking id to your website. Copy the code from the Google Analytics and paste in the home page of your website after the head tag in the body tag. You can Place code anywhere in the body section. After pasting and saving the code in the HTML code of your website, click the check status button of your Google Analytics account to ensure that analytics is tracking your website properly.
Setting Google Analytics for Ecommerce
You can set up Google Analytics for your Ecommerce website as well. However, you have to make minor changes for doing this. On goal setting page, do not insert any goal value. In site profile, change the profile of your website as an Ecommerce. Insert the tracking code in the receipt page in the standard fashion. below the tracking code you will need to insert the code for e-commerce tracking.


Everything that are within the [] has to be replaced by actual values by your engine. The final output would actually look something similar to

UTM:T34535Main Store111108.068467.0610.00San DiegoCAUSA
UTM:I34535XF-1024Urchin T-ShirtShirts11399.009
UTM:I34535CU-3424Urchin Drink HolderAccessories20.002

For every transaction there will be one Transaction line that is indicated by the “T” after UTM – this line contains the total for the transaction including taxes and other information. The lines with an “I” after the UTM is the Item line and these contain the details of the items, their price and other details. There can be unlimited number of item lines for any transaction. An Item line generated for each of the items that are processed during the transaction.
The final step is to call the function “utmSetTrans” when the form gets submitted. This is important to record the e-commerce information. This can be done in two ways.

You can call the function on Body OnLoad as shown below


If you do not have access to the body tag then you can call it within a separate Script tag. You need to ENSURE that the function is called AFTER the form.


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