Week 3- Google Analytics and date range

Google Analytics is an easy way to track your website traffic and see exactly how many people are visiting your website. One great feature of using Google Analytics is that it can tell you important information about your website visitors such as the type of browser they are using or even how that visitor came across your website. You can even customize and filter the data that Google Analytics collects to make a report that is specific to what you want to know about your website visitors, making it perfect for business owners who want to achieve a certain goal with their website. Anyone can create a Google Analytics account and all you need is a Google/Gmail account to get started.

How does Google Analytics work?

The book, Introduction to Google Analytics, does a great job of explaining how to get started in Google Analytics as well as what the goal of Google Analytics is. "At a very basic level, what programs like Google Analytics seek to give you is a sense of your web site’s performance—that is, how many people visit, and their behavior on the site" (Kelsey 20). To see how Google Analytics works, I decided to connect my Blogger account to my Google Analytics account to see how what type of website traffic my blog attracts. After creating a Google Analytics account all I needed to do was copy the tracking code generated by Google and paste it into the Google Analytics section under settings in Blogger. Once you set up an account and tracking code you can see a whole bunch of data about your website visitors depending on the date range you choose. A cool feature is that you could choose a real time view that shows any current active users on your site or you can choose a date range of 7 days to 180 days. You can  change the date range at any time to see how your website is doing over a period time and can see a variety of information about your website visitors. Below is an image of what Google Analytics told me about my website visitors including what country they are from as well as what device they were using. 

Try out Google Analytics today to see where your website visitors are from and how your website is doing!