What is Google Analytics? How to integrate Google Analytics into a website

Google also encourages users to integrate Google Analytics into their websites, as it is a free website tracking and analysis tool from Google. But in reality, you might not need to integrate it, you can perfectly install a different tool instead. However, if you want to register a Google Adsense account or a service with Google, you should integrate Google Analytics into your website. 

I. What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free website tracking, evaluation, and analysis tool developed by Google. It is indeed a really handy tool that helps you analyze your website traffic.

Furthermore, Google Analytics is also very useful in analyzing and enhancing your website performance. It allows you to know the source of the users' traffic, the volume of users, the average time for a session, and the bounce rate. Hence, you can assess your users' behavior and optimize your website better.

II. How does Google Analytics work?

The mechanism of Google Analytics is relatively simple; you only need to create a tracking code then attach it to your website. This code will integrate a tracking tool, record users' behavior, analyze traffic volume, demographics such as age, gender, users' interests, then send all of the information to the Google Analytics system. Consequently, Google Analytics will have enough data to analyze and create reports for you.

III. How does integrating Google Analytics affect your website?

Google Analytics will serve as a source of information for Google to better understand your website, thereby potentially enhancing your website's ranking on Google's search engine. 

When integrated, Google Analytics might make your website slightly slower because Google Analytics is a script, and scripts require some time to load and run. However, in my opinion, it doesn't significantly affect the performance. My view is that Google Analytics should be integrated into your website.

IV. How to integrate Google Analytics into a website

1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account

If you already have a Google account, a Gmail account, skip the registration step. If not, please register a Gmail account.

2. Setting up Google Analytics

Here's how to integrate Google Analytics into your website:

Step 1: Visit https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/ and choose Sign in to Analytics

Step 2: Google will automatically open a new page for you to start setting up Google Analytics; click Start measuring.

Step 3: Next is the account setup step, please input the Account name to your liking, then click Next to proceed to Property setup.

Step 4: Please continue to input the Property name, choose the Vietnam time zone and Vietnamese Dong currency, then click Next.

Step 5: Set up your company’s information. Please select the Industry most relevant to your business, the business size, and you need to select the reason for setting up Google Analytics; you can select all if you want, then click to Create.

Step 6: Accept the terms to proceed to Set up a data stream to start collecting data. 

Step 7: Choose the platform to integrate the Google Analytics tool. Here I'll guide on integrating Google Analytics into a website, so choose the Web option.

Step 8: Input the website URL and Stream name. The advanced measurement features part can be left as is or could be turned off depending on your needs. Click Create to have completed the creation of the Google Analytics monitoring code script.

Step 9: To integrate Google Analytics into your website, go to the Add tag to a new page section. Then in the Global site tag section, copy this code and paste it right into the head tag of your website to complete the setup.

If you use WordPress open-source code, log into admin> choose Appearance > Theme Editor. Open the header.php file and paste the code into the head tag to finish.

That's how to set up Google Analytics. For how to use Google Analytics, please refer to my next article.

V. Google Analytics features

Google Analytics provides information related to the users, users' behavior on your website. So, when using Google Analytics, you mostly read the statistical report on users' behaviors so you can optimize and improve your website's performance.

Google Analytics primarily has these features:

• See real-time report: The report indicates the current behavior of users on your website, including indicators such as average session time, most visited pages, traffic source, etc.
• View all detailed information: Display the latest, custom automatic detailed information for your property. The system refreshes this overview page in real time, as new details get activated and when Analytics identifies interesting detailed information.
• View user acquisition information: Report the number of new users in the past.
• View traffic acquisition information: report user interaction sessions, average time per interaction session...
• View a country report: Report users by country.
• View user retention rate: Report user retention rate over time.
• View pages and screens: Report views according to Page Title and Screen type.
• View event report: Report event numbers according to Event name over time.
• View conversion rate report: Report conversion rate (this is used for Google Ads conversion ads).
• View item report: Report the number of ecommerce purchases by Item name over time.