This is a step by step guide on how you can integrate your Adsense Account with your Google Analytics account.

Step-By-Step Instructions

1. Login into your AdSense account.
2. If you have not integrated your AdSense account to your Google Analytics account, you will see the link “Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics “. Click on it.
3. Assuming you have already created your AdSense account, select the option “I already have a Google Analytics account. Please link it to this AdSense account” and click “Continue”. 
4. If you only have 1 profile in your Google Analytics account then just click “Finish” and you are done.
5. If you have more than 1 profile in your Google Analytics account, you will need to select the account and profiles that you want to link to. Once you have made your selection, click “Continue”
6. Select which domain will be your primary domain. Click “Continue”
7. Add code only to non-primary domain. Take note that you don’t need to add code to the primary domain.
8. Click “Continue” and you are done.

You may think this sounds funny on why we should specifically configure a filter so that we are only measuring traffic that comes from the intended website. Aren’t we measuring our website traffic when we insert the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) into our web pages?

Well, that’s pretty true but do also consider what happens when your GATC code is also pasted into another website. See the impact yet? If you don’t specify which website traffic that your report should be catering for, you may end up reporting traffic from a website that you may not be aware off.

Now, you may not think this is important but when you see your Analytics report screw up, then you will wish you listened. Yes, this happened to me before when I accidentally copied my GATC code into another website I was building. I didn’t realize the mistake of having the same GATC on 2 websites until I saw the analytics report of the first website. What were the signs? Firstly, it was the sudden increase in traffic and then followed by the report of a bunch of keywords not related to the first website.

All this could have been avoided if the filter to include only traffic from the intended website is configured into the profile.

Step-By-Step Instructions

1. Login to your Google Analytics account.  
2. Go to the “Profile Settings” of your Google Analytics account. 
3. Click on “Add Filter” in the “Filters Applied to Profile” box.
4. Select “Add new Filter for Profile”. Give the filter a name in “Filter Name”
5. For Filter Type, select “Custom filter”. Select “Include”.
6. For Filter Field, select “Hostname”. 
7. For Filter Pattern, enter “sitename\.com”. Please take note of the backslash symbol “\” before the dot. For example, if your website is “johndoe.com”, enter “johndoe\.com” in the Filter Pattern. 
8. Click “Save Changes”.

There are visitors who you should exclude from your analytics report as these people may generate a relatively high level of pageviews that can have an impact on what you are trying to measure. This is especially true if the website is new and most of the traffic generated would be in-house. Examples of visitors that should be excluded are your staff, your outsourced marketing team, your design team and even you yourself.

These are the things that can have an impact on your analytics report if they are not excluded:

• Your web team doing a test of the website. Each click will record a pageview. Definitely see a spike in the report when the team is working.
• Company staff setting the website as the homepage on their browser. You will end up having lots of returning visitors in your report.

In order to exclude known visitors from your analytics report, we attempt to do this by identifying them with their IP addresses first and then exclude these IP addresses from the report. This can be easily done by setting up a filter in the profile using the Filter Manager.

It’s pretty straightforward if the known visitors has a fixed IP address but for those with dynamic IP addresses, there are additional process to take into account. First, we create a hidden page and direct the known visitors to this page. Any visitors that lands on the hidden page will be tagged with a special label. Once the known visitors are tagged with this special label, the pageview data will contain this label for any pages they visit on the website. The next thing to do is to exclude pageview data that contains this label from the report. 

For example:
John who is the web designer is directed to a hidden page where he will be labeled “knownguy”. He then goes and visit the Widget A page. Google Analytics will record a pageview for that page and at the same time insert the “knownguy” label to that particular pageview data. When the pageview report for Widget A is generated, we create a filter to list all pageviews for Widget A and exclude any of them that contains the label “knownguy”. John will be automatially excluded from this report.

Step-By-Step Instructions 

(How To Exclude Known Visitors With Fixed IP Addresses)

1. Go to the “Profile Settings” of your Google Analytics account. 
2. Click on “Add Filter” in the “Filters Applied to Profile” box.
3. Select “Add new Filter for Profile”. Give the filter a name in “Filter Name”.
4. Select “Predefined filter” 
5. Select “Exclude”. Select “traffic from the IP addresses”. Select “that are equal to”.  Enter the known IP address to exclude.
6. Click “Save Changes”.

Step-By-Step Instructions 

(How To Exclude Known Visitors From A Range Of IP Addresses)

1. Visit http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55572
2. Enter the First IP Address and Last IP Address.
3. Click “Generate RegEx”. 
4. Copy the code that appears in “Step 3”
5. Go to your Google Analytics account and visit the “Create New Filter” page.
6. Enter a “Filter Name” 
7. Select “Custom Filter”. Select “Exclude” 
8. For Filter Field, select “Visitor IP Address” 
9. For Filter Patter, paste the code generated in step 4 here. 
10. Click “Save Changes”

Step-By-Step Instructions 

(How To Exclude Known Visitors With Dynamic IP Addresses)

1. Create a hidden page called “specialtrack.htm” or whatever name you like.
2. Insert the standard Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) into the page.

   <script type=”text/javascript”>
   var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
   document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
   </script><script type=”text/javascript”>
   try {
   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-12312312-1″);
   pageTracker._trackPageview();
   pageTracker._setvar(“knownguy”);
   } catch(err) {}</script>

3. Insert the code below into the GATC code as indicated in red. You can replace the label “knownguy” with any label you like.

   pageTracker._setvar(“knownguy”);

4.  Save the hidden page and upload into your server.
5. Go to your Google Analytics account and visit the “Create New Filter” page.
6. Enter a Filter Name. Select “Custom filter”. Select “Exclude”
7. In “Filter Field”, select “User Defined”. 
8. In “Filter Pattern”, enter “knownguy” or the label you choose to use in your code.
9. Click “Save Changes”

For a website that has set up its analytics tracking properly, it may not be uncommon for the website to have more than 1 Google Analytics profile in place. Now each profile will have its own set of filters that make the profile unique but at the same time you will also find filters that are common across all profiles.

Common filters like excluding internal staff traffic, including traffic from own domain only and excluding a known IP address are normally found in most profiles. So do you need to create the same filters over and over again in all your profiles? The answer is no as this can be really inefficient. Imagine the numerous times you have to update each filter in the different profiles separately if you want to make some minor changes to it.

Below is a diagram of profiles that have common filters applied to it in an inefficient manner.

If you have filters that are common across all profiles, you can create the filter once and apply it on all the profiles that require it after that. You do not need to create a new filter for each profile for common filters. The diagram below best illustrates the structure.

A point to note is that to test a filter out in a new profile before applying it to all the existing profiles. It can be disastrous if the filter does not work as intended and it’s applied across all your profiles.

Step-By-Step Instructions

1. Login to your Google Analytics account.
2. Add a new “Profile”

   

3. Select “Add a Profile for an existing domain”. Enter a profile name. Example “UK Traffic Only”.

   

4. Click “Continue”. 
5. Edit the profile you just created. Click “Edit”.

   

6. Click on “Add Filter” in the “Filters Applied to Profile” box.

   

7. Select “Apply existing Filter to Profile”. Select from a list of “Available Filters” that you have already created for previous profiles. Add the existing filters you need for the new profile.

   

8. Click “Save Changes”.

By default, Google Analytics will give credit to the last referrer for a successful conversion. Take for example the scenario below:

Example Scenario

John runs 2 PPC campaigns simultaneously for his website and a conversion took place following the path as shown below.

PPC Campaign 1 – Visitor enters the website and leaves (referrer 1)

PPC Campaign 2 – Same visitor enters the website and converts (referrer 2)

In the abover scenario, Google Analytics will report that it is PPC Campaign 2 that will be credited for the conversion of the visitor. But what if you would ike to give attribution to the first referrer (PPC Campaign 1) for the conversion instead of the last referrer? You can do this by appending the landing page URL with the utm_nooverride=1 parameter.

For example, in your Google AdWords landing page URL this is how the URL would look like:

http://www.site.com/product.html?utm_nooverride=1

Using the scenario above, all you need to do to give credit to the first referer for the conversion is to append both campaigns landing page URLs with the utm_nooverride=1 parameter.

In your Google AdWords, this is how you would be entering your destination URL as shown above.

In Google Analytics, once your account has been setup, you can configure profiles to view only data that matters to you or to a specific audience. For example, you can set up a profile to view only data from a specific country, and another profile that measures all traffic to the website but excluding the internal staff.

Use Profile to Report Various Properties of Your Website

Profiles are a great way to measure different parts of your website. For instance, you can setup a profile to measure only the traffic to your blog, another profile to track your landing pages and a separate profile to measure the product catalog pages.

The main purpose of setting up various profiles is to segment out the data and only view data that you would like to focus on. For example, if you would just like to view tracking data from Australia, you can set up a profile just for that so you won’t be distracted by data from other parts of the world.

Limiting User Access to a Report

If you have multiple users that need access to analytics report that are specific to each individual needs, you can use profiles to limit their access.

For example, if John is the product manager for product A and Jane is the product manager for product B, we can set up 2 different profiles to cater for these 2 products without them interfering with each other marketing data. So instead of providing full administrative rights to John and Jane to the data, we can give them a “View Report Only” access to the relevant profiles. 

In this case, John will have access only to Product A data and Jane to Product B data.
Before you set up different profiles for different users or target groups, it is always good to plan ahead who needs what data first. This will ensure that information that is needed and nothing more is within the reach of the right people.

Best Practice Profile Setup

There are 3 things that I would suggest you do when setting up a profile:

1. Always keep a Raw Data Profile that has no filters. This is usually the very first profile that you create when you set up a new account. If you do not have a Master Profile and only filtered profiles, the filtered profiles will not contain data that has been excluded and you will not have a way to get those data back. For instance, if you have only 1 profile and that profile has a filter that includes only traffic from the UK, you will not be able to retrieve data on other countries if you need it in the future.
2. Test out new filters on a new profile if unsure or a Test Profile. Creating filters can be tricky at times and can be pretty technical. If you are not confident on what the filter is going to do to your data, it’s always good to create a new profile to try out the new filter first before applying the filters to your existing profile. It may save you some heartache.
3. For all filters that have been tested and are providing data as intended, you can then set them up in a  Master Profile. This is the profile you will use for analysis.

Google Analytics make it really simple to set the account up and get it running in minutes (well for most of my sites at least) that sometimes we do take it for granted. But even for such a simple affair, we can still see cases where account set up is not done based on best practices and this can come back and haunt them later.

Well let me share with you one of the best practices that you can use when setting up your new Google Analytics (GA) account so that you don’t need to rework and lose all your data after months of data collection.

Account Structure: 1 Website 1 Account

Set up a new account for each website that you want to track. That means you don’t mix your personal websites with your business websites. You don’t put all your clients’ websites into one single account. For each client or website, you create a new account to track the website. Although technically you can put multiple websites in 1 account by creating multiple profiles, there are just too many reasons why you should still allocate 1 account to 1 website.

Client Accounts

This is especially true if you manage other people’s websites or if you are an agency, you should adhere to the 1 GA account to 1 client rule. Imagine if you were to track all your clients’ websites in 1 GA account, you will encounter problems when one of the client request administrative access to their account. If access were to be given to the client, they will have access to all the websites in the account. I am pretty sure all the other clients in that account won’t be too happy about this especially if you manage clients within the same industry. They may not be ready to share competitive data with each other.

Own Accounts

Even if you own all the websites, you will still want to create individual accounts for each of them. In the long run, if you decide to sell any of the websites you own, you can also package the individual analytics account together with ease and this will not interrupt with the tracking of your other websites. If you were to house all your websites in 1 account, can you imagine telling your buyer that you can’t give them access to the analytics account because it’s tied to your 1 single account?  And there is no way you can undo this for the buyer and the buyer has to start tracking it from a new account.  So do it right and it can save you some embarrassment later.

This is a step by step instructions on how to create your Google Analytics account.

Step-By-Step Instructions

1. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/
2. Click “Sign Up Now”

   

3. Sign in with your Google Account. If you do not have a Google Account, you can sign up for one on this page as well.

   

4. Click “Sign Up”.

   

5. Enter your website URL. Your account name will be automatically be populated with your website name.

   

6. Enter your Last Name and First Name. Enter your country as well. Click “Continue”.

   

7. Read the “Google Analytics Term Of Service”. Check the checkbox “Yes, I agree to the above terms and conditions”.
8. Click “Create New Account”.
9. Copy the code shown on the webpage and paste it onto any of your pages you want to track.

   

10. Scroll to the bottom. Click “Save and Finish”.
11. Once you have inserted the code into your web pages, wait for 24 hours (sometimes it’s less) for it to gather data from your website.

Synopsis:

• How to track your presence through social media
• Learn how to build relationships using social media
• Explore the various tools that can measure your social media presence
• Find out whether people are talking positively or negatively about your brand or products so you can deal with it immediately

Update: Graphedge.com is now part of https://raven-seo-tools.com

Duration: 26 Minutes, 23 seconds

Synopsis:

• Review some of the tools that you can use for competitive analysis
• Understand what metrics to look at when comparing your site with your competitors
• Look into ways how to compete with your competitors with the intelligence gathered

Duration: 17 Minutes, 25 seconds