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As we have been writing about with these posts, Google Analytics is a powerful tool to help with your site targeting, traffic improvement and conversion. If you are ready to use Google Analytics, you will need to set up an account with them. If you already have a Pay Per Click account with Google or Gmail, you can use that and will enable you to integrate it with your other Google services. In fact, if you already use Google Adwords, you can set up and integrate Analytics directly with your PPC account.

Here’s how you can start with Google Analytics:

  1. If you have a Google account, use your email address and password to sign in. If you have an Adwords Account, sign into it and click on the reporting tab to navigate to Analytics.
  2. If you don’t have a Google account, go to Google Analytics to open an account with Sign Up Now, to the left of the sign-in box, just below the Access Analytics button. You may want to bookmark this page as you will want to return to it frequently to check your Google Analytics reports later on.
  3. In the next window, once you’ve signed in, input the website address / URL of the site you wish to track and analyze with Google Analytics.
  4. Give the site an account name that is easy to remember. If you will be tracking multiple sites, you may want to give the name of the site or the URL as the account name
  5. Select the country your site is based in, or the country it is serving. Then select the appropriate time zone. Click continue to go to the next page.
  6. In the next window, provide your contact information and click continue.
  7. In the next window, read and accept the Google Analytics terms of service.
  8. Click Create New Account. Google will then provide you with a snippet of code – the Google Analytics (GA) code. Copy this code as you will need to insert it into your website on each page that you want Google to track and report on.
  9. Insert the GA code onto every page you want tracked, analyzed and reporting on. Insert the GA code at the top of the page immediately before the </head> tag, just above the <body> page. If you have a webmaster or technical support person who updates your pages, you can have them add the code to each page you want tracking information on. If you use templates, insert the code into them as well.
  10. Once the code is inserted you will then want to save the pages, and then uploaded the pages to your site. Within 24 hours, your GA account will begin receiving tracking information about your site and its performance. More on that later.