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).

Google Analytics offers a great wizard on how to manage all of the above scenarios. (click the Check Status link in your website settings inside Google Analytics)

Bonus: Google has pushed the boundaries of the tracking codes and developed what they call asynchronous tracking code which will make the loading time for code much faster. It is in beta, but if you are an advanced user and have no problems in understanding javascript implementation documentation I highly suggest to give it a try.

Tracking your whole website

Most of the times I diagnosed websites for the presence of the tracking code I found pages that simply weren’t tagged. This is one of the main reasons for which many website owners get their own domain as traffic source in the referring sites report in Google Analytics, but we will get back to this later.

If you have a small website you can use one of the following free services on the web: SiteScanGa by Epikone or GPablo (haven’t tried this one).

If you have a large website, things can get a little bit more complicated or more expensive. One of the options you have is to purchase a Market Research licence for WASP. If you can afford it, I recommend it especially if you use other analytics providers than Google Analytics as well.

For the free but  a little bit more technical way to do this, John Mueller has a great tutorial for it.

Troubleshooting

Having your own domain as referrer? This is the issue that gets to be very frustrating. Most of the times it happens, as I said earlier, because some pages in the website haven’t been tagged. All the visitors that continue browsing the website after entering through those pages will be considered as referred by your domain, which technically is correct. Here are other situations when you get your own website as a referrer:

• temporary redirects for entrance points in the website(302)
• faulty cross-domains tracking
• faulty encoding when passing referring sources data
• session expiration issues (visitors forgetting their browser open with your page for more than 30 minutes)

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking
• Bonus tracking tips and hacks (filters, segments and others)

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

We like having fun and we like to explore the world of real time behavior targeting. Ok, maybe these words are a little bit too big for the wordpress plugin that we developed, but it points in the same direction. Just like the title says, the plug-in will offer you the possibility to display a list of published articles on your blog since a returning visitor’s last visit.

It only interacts with returning visitors, the ones that are not coming from a feed and only where and how you wish to. We’ve been secretly testing the plugin so far and we decided it’s stable enough to release it to the world. Check it live on our blog.

Go to the plugin page to download (and some more information).

Using the CSS styles already defined by your theme, it will fit perfectly on your blog. Here is how it looks for our blog: