Are you involved in a campaign that needs a strong online presence?  Do you ever wonder whether your website is performing well, compelling visitors to sign up and take action, and at what rates?  Do you want to know if visitors to your site are finding the information they are looking for? How can you optimize the time and effort your online outreach requires with limited resources?

If any of these things have crossed your mind, you should tune into our series of upcoming blog posts that will focus on how to use Google Analytics to improve your nonprofit website, issue-focused web content, and your campaign’s online presence.  Or, if you know the basics of Google Analytics, but want to know what else you can do with your website analytics, we will help to get you to the next level.

What can you look forward to?  Over the next couple of weeks we will be looking at how you can use Google Analytics to:

• Track web traffic on multiple URLs or subdomains.
• Find opportunities to boost your web traffic.
• Improve your web content to keep your visitors engaged.
• Identify opportunities for developing strategic partnerships.
• Track and improve sign-up and online action rates.
• Track incoming link success from emails and ads.

These are just a few of the things that Google Analytics can do for you and your campaign.

Now let’s get started.

Setting Up a Google Analytics Account

If you have not yet installed Google Analytics on your site, go to http://www.google.com/analytics to sign up for an account.  Fill out the fields you are prompted to enter including your website URL.  If you have subdomains or additional URLs you would like to track using Google Analytics, you will be prompted to select this option once your account is created.

After you accept the terms and create your account, you should select the checkboxes on the confirmation page that apply to the site you are setting up such as:

• A single domain
• One domain with multiple subdomains
• Multiple top-level domains

At this point, prior to installing the code on your page, it is a good idea to take a couple additional steps to configure your profile prior to installing your code in order to get the most out of Google Analytics.  This is especially true if your website tracks visitors with a unique identifier, or if you are setting up an e-commerce site.  From your primary account page you will select the “Edit” link to the right of xyz.  At the top under the “Main Website Profile Information” section, you will select “Edit” and you should add your “Default Page” and “E-Commerce Website” if you have one.

This is also where you can “Exclude URL Query Parameters” to make sure that your reports are clean and easily interpreted.  This is especially important if your site has dynamically generated query parameters, such as session IDs.  If this applies to you, you can find out more about this here.

In addition, if you would like to exclude traffic from specific IP addresses or ranges of addresses, such as from internal traffic from your home or organization’s intranet, you should do this at this point under the “Filters” section of your profile settings.  Google Analytics has some good information on how to set up a filter to exclude IP addresses.

Once you have adjusted these profile settings, you are ready to install your tracking code!  We will go more in depth in our next post, but if you can’t wait, you can look here to find more information on how to set up the tracking code start collecting baseline data on your website visitors.

In order to install Google Analytics you will need access to your Content Management System (CMS) or your website templates.  Note that these are instructions for the asynchronous tacking code which Google released in December of 2009 and which load faster than the old code.  If you still have the old Google Analytics tracking code, you can follow the instructions for migrating to async tracking to improve load times to your site.