Google Analytics: The Modern Way to Know Your Users
How many users came to your site today?
Do you know how many people are coming to your site? How could you figure that out? Well, if you live in the 1990s, you could put one of those little web counters at the bottom of your screen and keep track every time someone clicks it (you could also say hi to Ace of Base for us).
Now there’s a much better way to track web activity: Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free service you can sign up for that will track all sorts of useful information on your site. It tracks much more than just who shows up. It will also tell you how many users are boys or girls, where they’re coming to your site from, how often they come back, even what kind of computer they’re using.
At One Month, we use Google Analytics to track data that allows us to figure out what sort of content will help our community best. Like when we found out that many of our visitors are Windows users, that helped us remember to keep them in mind when we make our classes.
Any web site you make can benefit from Google Analytics. It doesn’t matter if the site is a straight out of the box site from somewhere like Squarespace or if it’s a site you made yourself. It also doesn’t matter if you’ve never tracked the site before; you can add Google Analytics to it now.
Here’s how you get started:
- Create a new account at the Google Analytics homepage.
- Fill in a quick form with some details of you and your web site.
- Copy the tracking script they give you into the code of your site (make sure it’s showing up on every page).
Then you’re ready to track your demographics.
Takeaways
- Google Analytics helps web sites track user demographics
- If you have a web site, you need good demographics to make content your users need.
- Adding Google Analytics to your web site is easy no matter what kind of web site you’re using.
