Adding Google Analytics to your site is a wonderful (and free!) way to track what your visitors are doing. How many people visit your organization's about page? Are people clicking through or just leaving after they land on your home page? Is that new print campaign generating any traffic? You won't have any idea without this tool.
To start, you'll need to sign up for a Google Analytics account. The Google Analytics homepage will take you through the process of setting up your account and you don't have to have a gmail account for this, any email address will be fine.
Once you are registered, log in to the Google Analytics control panel and click "Add Website Profile" on the bottom left to get started. On the Website Profile page make sure "Add a Profile for a new domain" is selected and type your URL into the box. Select the correct time zone to get an accurate account of what time of day your visitors are on your website. Click "continue".
Google will automatically generate the code for your website, all you have to do is copy and paste it into your pages. If you have static pages (html only), I would start by putting the code on the main pages of your site, i.e. your homepage, the about page, and so on. If your site is built using CSS or with a content management system like Wordpress or Drupal, you can add the code to the footer.php file and all your pages will be tracked when that file is read. Google prefers that you add their line of code just before the end body tag [/body].
Once you've had the code on your site for a few days, you'll naturally be curious about who's visiting, so to see your web statistics, click on "View Reports" on the control panel page. Click around using the navigation on the left to learn more about where your visitors came from and what pages they looked at on your site.
Google Analytics is a helpful tool that will allow your organization to see where your visitors are spending time on your site and enable you to make improvements based on solid tracking data.
ASF 2010 Annual Report
