How To Start Tracking Your Website

Posted in Web Analytics Consultancy | November 04th, 2009

Written by
Jereme Wong

COO, clickTRUE. Oversee daily operations of the company. Early adopter when it comes to the technology and web. Love watching the Internet grow and evolve, and being part of it. Interested in: Web2.0 Applications, Digital Marketing, Analytics and Social Media. Follow me @jeremewong

This post is written for all the newbies out there who either own a website or manage one. If you are looking at help to track your current website activity, you are definitely on the right mindset to get more out of your website.

The typical process goes like this:

Setup tracking for your website
Ensure tracking is setup correctly
Collect data
Analyze data and understand the key metrics
Refine your site with your key metrics in mind
Test

For now, let’s just focus on getting step 1-3 right. Also, since there are tonnes of material available on the net to do this, I will just be compiling some of the useful videos from various sources to get you started.

Choosing Your Web Analytics Tracking Tool

One widely available tracking tool is Google Analytics (GA). It is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines, and your various marketing channels and drill down to user activity such as how much time are your users spending on your site. The installation is easy if you are looking at tracking a single domain site. All you need to do is to put in the tracking code, and viola! You should see some data coming in the next day.

Installing Google Analytics

Here’s a quick video to show you how to put in the GA Tracking Code on your site.

Checking Your Tracking Code

Once you have done the above, now to check if the code is plastered across your site.

Alternatively, you could also check out EpikOne’s SiteScan application to verify if your GATC is installed properly.

Note that once your tracking code is installed correctly, data will only be streamed to your GA Dashboard by the next day. We will discuss more about familiarizing you with the GA Interface in future posts. For now, congratulations to your first step in Measuring For Success!