How to Set Up Google Analytics: The Complete Guide (with video)

If you have Google Analytics set up on your website, you are one of the tens of millions of websites using the most popular analytics tool on the internet. This post and video may help you confirm that it’s set up properly.

If you don’t have it set up, you are just 52 clicks away. Here’s your complete guide on how to set up Google Analytics quickly for the most accurate reporting possible.

Let’s answer a few basic questions and then go into the step-by-step instructions. But first, here’s the complete video:

How does Google Analytics work? What does it track?

Just now, when this page loaded, a tiny bit of Javascript was triggered. It talked to five tiny cookies on your device, then it reported back to Google and stored the information in our Google Analytics (GA) account.

Through this clever combination of Javascript and cookies, Analytics tracked that the page was viewed.

It doesn’t know who visited or what they looked at. It doesn’t know how long they were on the page unless they went to another page and triggered the Javascript again. There’s a LOT that Analytics doesn’t track.

By default, it doesn’t track anything except when pages load. So any “non-pageview interactions” is not tracked unless you use “event tracking.” But that’s a topic for another article.

Here’s a quick list of 16 types of clicks that aren’t recorded in Google Analytics.