- Perth, Australia
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Around 15 minutes from start to finish. Written for people who’ve never opened Google Analytics in their life.
Google Analytics is the most useful free tool on the internet for understanding your website, and one of the most confusing if you’ve never set one up. This guide takes you from zero to “data flowing” without any jargon. If you get stuck at any step, send me an email and I’ll help.
Why bother? Without analytics, every marketing decision is a guess. You won’t know which pages people land on, what they click, where they came from, or whether anything you’re doing is actually bringing in business. With analytics installed, you can answer all of those questions, and so can I, when we work together.
Choose “Web” as your platform. Enter your website URL (the full thing, https and all) and a stream name (your business name works). Leave “Enhanced measurement” turned on, it tracks useful things like scrolls, outbound clicks and file downloads automatically.
Click “Create stream”. On the next screen, you’ll see your Measurement ID. It looks like G-XXXXXXXXXX. Copy it: you’ll need it in the next step.
<head>. If you don’t have a developer, email me, I’ll either talk you through it or recommend someone.Then it’s worth tracking that account down before you set up a new one, because a fresh setup starts from zero and the old reports stay locked away. Most trouble logging into Google Analytics comes down to it being set up under someone else’s Google account, often a previous developer, and it’s often fixable once you know where to look.
You’ll see real-time data immediately. Most reports start filling in within 24 hours, and the data becomes genuinely useful for decisions after about a month of traffic.
If any of your visitors are in the EU, UK, or some Australian states with newer privacy laws, yes. We can set this up together, there are simple free options.
Unfortunately not. Universal Analytics was retired in 2023 and the data sits in a different format. Your old data is still accessible to view, but GA4 starts from scratch.
Yes: once it’s working, the next two things are setting up conversions (tracking the actions you actually care about, like form submissions or purchases) and connecting it to Google Ads if you run ads. Both are things we’ll do together if you’re a client.