How to Install a Google Analytics Tracking Code

November 21, 2007

Keeping with the fact that I decided to write a series of tutorials on how to use Google Analytics I realized that I never wrote an article about how easy it is to actually install Google Analytics. Google Analytics itself works by grabbing information from your website using what is known as a “tracking code”, a little piece of JavaScript that grabs whatever data you’ve asked Google Analytics to grab and it looks like this…

<script src=”http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=”text/javascript”>

</script>

<script type=”text/javascript”>

_uacct = “UA-XXXXXXX-X”;

urchinTracker();

</script>

This tracking code is provided by logging into your Google Analytics Account. Simply do the following to get your own analytics tracking code…

Log into your GA account
You will look on the Analytics settings page (Hint: it’s the page you are brought to when you first sign in)
Go to the website profile of the site you want to install Google Analytics tracking on (if this is your first time logging into Google Analytics you’ll need to setup a profile for the site you want Google analytics running on)
Under “Settings” click the “Edit” link beside the website you want to install the tracking code on and this will bring you to a page called “Profile Settings”
On the “Profile Settings” page click on the “Check Status” link at the top right hand side of the page which will bring you to the tracking code page
Copy and Paste the Google Analytics tracking code from this page and install it just before the </body> tag on your webpage and click the “Finish” button at the bottom of the Google Analytics Tracking Code page

It’s just that simple you get Google Analytics working for you! In the next article I’ll show you how to test to ensure that the Google Analytics Tracking Code is working properly with a third party tool.

Luc

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Posted by Lucas | Filed Under General, Google Analytics, Tips, Tricks and Tools, Web Analytics, Web Intelligence