Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that allows you to review stats about who comes to your website, where they came from and what they did when they got there. One would think that every person on the internet with a website would have Google Analytics already, but anything labeled “Analytics” does give off the first impression that it is complicated and hard to set up. I am writing this guide in order to dispel those myths and show just how easy it is to have Analytics watching your site.

Step 1) Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics Sign-up Page

Step 2) Click “Create an Account” and set up an account for yourself, or, sign-in to your Google Account.

Google Analytics User Sign-up

Step 3) When you sign-in for the first time, you should end up at a screen like above, fill it out.

Google Analytics new account sign-up

 Step 4) The next page should look like the following, make sure all the options on this page are to your liking.

Google Analytics tracking code page

Step 5) Scrolling to the bottom of the page above, you will see a code snippet, copy it to your clipboard.

Google Analytics tracking code snippet

Step 6) Once you have the code, you need to paste it into the website that you listed earlier in the form on step 3. You can do this by pasting the code before the closing </head> tag as shown in the pictures below.

Google Analytics Code entry

Google Analytics code entered

Step 7) This code should be put in the header of every page you want to track in your website. Some Content Management Systems (WordPress, etc) are set up so that you only have to add the code to the header file of the website and it appends it to all pages, so keep this in mind.

That is the end of this simple tutorial, and as you can see, it doesn’t take that long. Now go ahead and add Google Analytics to your website and optimize your site for more traffic.