Setting up Google Analytics on your Photography Site

I frequent a few photography forums. On several of them I’ve noticed people asking for reviews of their personal websites (I’m one of them). Often, somewhere in the comments somebody says “you should sign up for Google Analytics” and/or “you should sign up for Google Webmaster Tools”. I have used both of these tools quite a bit on several of my websites. They provide you a window into information that you didn’t realize was really (freely) available before. After using these for a while you will feel that without them you are flying blind. Needless to say I am a proponent of the tools.

I thought that since a large number of photographers are building sites and a large number of the people reviewing those sites are recommending the Google tools, why don’t I put together a few blog postings showing folks how to get their site setup with these tools. Perhaps many of the people designing and creating their websites already know but I’m willing to bet that some do not.


What is the difference between Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools?

First though - what are the two tools and what is the difference between them (and why are they such a good thing to have)? In brief, Analytics lets you see how users are using your site while Webmaster Tools lets you see how Google sees your site.

According to Google, Analytics is described as follows:

“Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web.”

For example – what kind of browsers are your users using? (you want to make sure your site performs as expected in the most frequently used browsers for your site). What kind of connection speed do the users have? (are folks still using dialup to access your site?). What countries are they coming from? How often are they returning to your site?, etc. This list goes on. These are great things to know and they can change your approach and strategies.


Google describe Webmaster Tools as follows:

“Your Google Webmaster Tools account provides information about your added sites, Sitemaps, their latest updates, and also allows you to add new Sitemaps for crawling by Google.”

This definition is a little hard to understand I think. I feel that Webmaster Tools gives you insights into how Google sees your site. Why do you care? Well, you want your pages to be in the Google search index and you want them to rank well so you can get more traffic. Webmaster Tools lets you upload sitemaps to Google, it tells you what issues (if any) the Google spider may be having when trying to crawl your site (and grab your pages), it tells you how the spider “sees” your site in terms of keywords and frequency, and a number of other things.

I really feel that webmasters need to have both tools operating for their website but it may be that folks will get more out of Analytics first. As such I will focus this writeup on how to install Analytics and then do Webmaster Tools in my next blog installment.


Installing Google Analytics

You must have an account with Google. It is free. If you have an account, great, if not then go to the Google homepage www.google.com and check the upper right of the page:



Click “Sign in” and either sign in if you have an existing account (bear in mind this will tie your Analytics to this account), or if you don’t have a Google account click “Create an account now” and sign up for an account.

Once you have an account go to:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

and sign in using the email and password you used to create your Google Account. After entering your email and password you should see page like the one below:



Just click on the “Sign Up” button. This will take you to the New Account Sign Up page.



Fill in the information, then continue to the Contact Information page and fill this in as well. On the next page accept the User Agreement and this will take you to the Add Tracking page. This is the page that contains the code you need to add to your website in order for Analytics to work.

Click on the “New Tracking Code (ga.js)” tab – see below – and copy the code in the box.



As Google says you have to paste this code immediately before the tag of each page you are planning to track. Hopefully you use a template for your site and you can just insert this in the homepage – in this case you only have to past this into the template once (because it will then appear automatically on all of your pages). Or, as some folks in the forums have pointed out "insert the js code into an include file, perhaps something already existing like a copyright footer" - this accomplished the same thing.

Example of pasting the code below:





After you have finished pasting the code save the page. Back in Google you can click “Continue” from the Tracking Instructions page. You will then be taken to a page with a “Check Status” button. When you click this button Google will go look at your site and see if you have added the code correctly to your website's homepage.

Upon successful validation Google will show the following:



That’s it! It usually takes about 24 hours before Analytics starts to show any information so after 24 hours or so log back in and browse the features. They are reasonably self explanatory and there are many.

I often review information like:

- Traffic sources – where is my traffic coming from. What is increasing, what is decreasing, etc.
- What is the bounce rate?
- What Keywords are driving traffic from what search engine?
- Which pages on the site are viewed most?
- Occasionally I look at what countries are driving traffic and also do a content overlay to see what links users are clicking-on on my homepage.


Analytics Video
I’ve found a great video put out by Google on what you can do with Analytics. It is really worth the 9 minutes it takes to watch it.