30 Days to Your First Website Design

Lesson Notes * Beginner’s Guide to Successful Conversion

Transcript Hi guys, welcome back to 30 Days to Your First Website Design, a Tuts+ Premium course. I’m Ian Yates and today we’re going to quickly implement Google analytics.

We’ll begin as always by taking a quick look at what we’re going to cover in this video:

• Firstly we’ll look at implementing Google Analytics
• We’ll look at some basic usage
• Before I suggest some further reading and set a (very simple) task.

Google Analytics is a very useful tool, and in the last few years it’s become common practice to implement it in any site. There are alternative tools for tracking your traffic, but Google Analytics is free, hugely capable, and growing all the time. Let’s go quickly to our site and implement Analytics as we go.

[Live screencast demo portions not available in transcript.]

Having implemented it, you’ll have access to all manner of metrics for tracking how visitors find your site and use it once they’re there. You can clearly see your visitor numbers, the number of those visitors who are unique, or repeating visitors, you can see the bounce rate (which we discussed earlier in the series), the location of your users, and all sorts of things.

It’s all very well to observe your visitor numbers rising and falling, but the true value is in understanding why your site behaves as it does. Use notations to mark significant events in the timeline, observe the most active times of the day, and the most productive sources of your traffic. You can even specify goals (remember we discussed them?) target pages or actions which you aim to achieve. You can lay out funnels; routes through your site to observe how effectively people navigate to your goals. Reacting to the data and improving your site as a result is the real advantage to implementing analytics.

There’s so much information available – but the first hurdle is of course implementing it and collecting data.

Next Steps OK, it’s time for some further reading: I’ve mentioned this one before actually, but it was all the way in the beginning of the series and it applies equally well on this occasion. A Beginner’s Guide to Successful Conversion looks in more detail at setting up and analyzing Goals and Funnels in google analytics.

I’d like you now to sign up for an analytics account if you don’t already have one, and implement Google Analytics to your site.

OK, that just about wraps things up – I’m Ian Yates and from all of us at Tuts+ thanks for watching!