No matter if you are just about to start a new website and want to track it using the power of Google Analytics or you are one of the early adopters of the powerful web analytics platform, an implementation checklist might be handy. This series of articles comes from my own need in having a clear checklist when starting any new client with web analytics consultancy.

First thing is first. As the owner of the website, make sure you own the analytics data for it. I’ve seen many cases where consultants create the Google Analytics profile on their username and share it with the owner of the website with read only rights. When the website owner wanted to switch the consultant guess what happened?

Yep, losing your analytics data is not cool at all. So, the owner of the website should be the one who creates the Google Analytics profile and shares it with as many consultants he wishes to. You can start by using your already existing Google account or create a new one.

So, here are the checklist chapters:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

Here is the short version of the checklist:

Let me know your feedback on it or if you would like me to cover any other aspects as well.

After creating a profile for your website in Google Analytics, the next step is to add the tracking code to your website. Google Analytics uses 2 different tracking codes: the old one, called urchin.js, quite limited in functionality and the new one called ga.js which Google continues to improve to higher standards quite frequently. My recommendation is to use or switch to the ga.js code.

The tracking code is customizable in order to fit the need of any website. It has 3 mandatory elements (the javascript file, the identification code and the tracker) and lots of optional elements. In order to make sure you’ll get accurate tracking when generating your tracking code you need to see what fits your website from the following:

• Your website uses subdomains;
• You use different domains for the same website (using this will also track subdomains);
• You want to track traffic from mobile devices as well (for advanced users).

This is something you want for sure to have it set up right. The main issue here is the Direct Traffic. Why? Well, for Google Analytics, any referrer that he can not understand (from Twitter applications to your RSS links, white-papers or software trials) is labeled automatically as direct traffic.

They say that you shouldn’t focus to get 100% accurate analytics data cause you will not get it. 95% accuracy will do it. However, I’ve seen cases where traffic sources data wasn’t even 30% accurate and that can hurt your business.

So, what is important to know about tracking traffic sources? They need special tagging. Your best friend for this action should be Google URL Builder. The new tags you will add to your links (you don’t need to change anything to your website) will allow Google Analytics to identify the real referrer so it will not go under direct traffic anymore.

Like everybody else, you’ve created your website with a purpose. Measuring how much your website meets your desired purpose is what goal & funnels setup is all about. Google Analytics allows you to define up to 20 goals of the following types:

• URL destination: how many visitors get to a page that confirms you they have finished a desired action (e.g. Thank You for Buying page);
• Time on site: How many visitors spend on your website more than the time you desire them to;
• Pages/Visit: How many visitors get to visit more than the number of pages / visit that you desire them to.

From the 3 types, the first one might give you some head ache, especially if you website is not static HTML, which is very likely. For this you will need to get some RegEX skills. If the thought of this scares you, just ask an analytics consultant to give you a hand (you can always give it a try on an analytics discussion group).

If you do have some RegEX skills, before setting up the goal and funnel just validate it using the method from the ROI Revolution Blog.

One of the coolest feature in Google Analytics is Site Search tracking. If your website provides a search functionality than people are using it.

By activating it you get to see a lot of great data about what people are searching, not to say a lot of ideas of keywords which you can use for your SEO campaign. So my advice is to go and set it up now.

Filters

Since the launch of Advanced Segments Filters haven’t been used so much, but they can still be valuable. What’s really important about them is that the technical difference between segments and filters is that the first are applied on visit level while the second at pageview level (more differences between the two). Ok, ok, being real time and working on historical data makes segments the best ever. . Here are the most common filters I’ve met and I still recommend as advanced segments can’t help you here:

• exclude your own traffic out from the reports of the website;
• view full referrer links from the sites that send you traffic;
• view subdomains data full paths in your reports;
• get the keywords users searched when clicking on your AdWords ads