Hello, in this part of the course, I want to talk about how we set up and start using Google Analytics on our website. So first thing we want to do is see if we have Google Analytics installed already. So to do this, there's a few different methods that we can use, we can check our website source code, we can use real time analytics, we can also use tools like built with or ga checker, though within ga checker are simple tools that you go in, you plug in your website's URL, and then it will tell you if it finds the source code built with looks at this at a site wide level. And then ga checker will actually look at this at a page by page level. So it can be a really handy tool to use ga checker to scan through your website and see if there are any pages that don't have Google Analytics installed on them.

Now, the method I want to spend some time talking about here is real time analytics. So with real time analytics, you can verify if Google Analytics tracking code is not only installed on your website, but if it's working on your website, there to load real time analytics, go into Google Analytics. And then in the sidebar, click on real time, then click on overview. Once you click on overview, you'll be taken to a page that looks something like this. Right, it will give you a count of how many people you have visiting your website right now will tell you the different pages people are using the different traffic sources they're coming from. Now, if you open up this report, and you have zero people currently on your website can be one of two things either means that your tracking code is not correctly installed.

Or it means that it is installed correctly. You just don't have anybody visiting right now. So if you see nobody on your website, you so zero visitors, go ahead and pick up your phone or open up a new tab on your computer and try and load your website. And then make sure that you see yourself coming up as a visitor on real time analytics. If you don't see yourself, when you know you're visiting your website, then you know that your tracking code isn't installed correctly and you need to fix something but if you see yourself loading your website, you know everything is working as it should. So how do we add Google Analytics to our website, if we find out, it's not working perfectly?

Well, to add Google Analytics in the sidebar, go all the way to the bottom and click on admin. This will take you to the admin screen. And then on here, we want to go to the center column. And then on the center column, we want to click on tracking info, and then click on tracking code. This will take us to a page that lists out the different pieces of information we need to install this track. So there's a couple different methods that you can use.

One method you can use is you can use the tracking ID. So if you're using WordPress on your website, you can get different plugins that will automatically link Google Analytics to your website. And those plugins will ask you for your tracking ID. And that's this number listed here on this screen. Now if you're not using WordPress or you're not using one of those plugins, the other method you have available is you can drop in the tracking code to drop it The tracking code, you copy the website tracking script here, this global site tag tag vs. code that's down here. And you copy all of that, and you paste that into every page of your website.

Once that's on there, or once you have the tracking ID installed, then you can go back to real time analytics, and you can check if everything is working as intended. So what do we need to do here? Well, you need to check if you have Google Analytics installed. So you could scan your website in ga checker, you can load your website, and then check and make sure that you see yourself visiting your website in real time analytics. Either way, you want to confirm that Google Analytics is not only installed, but tracking people who visit your website. Next up, I want to get into some of the reports that we can look at here in Google Analytics.

And I want to begin by talking about a report that will tell us how much traffic we have arriving on our website.