How to add Google Analytics to your Dreamweaver website.
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
In this video we're going to sign up for Google Analytics. Why? Because it gives you all of this information about who comes to your site, it's free, you can see, in my case, how many people have paid for courses on bringyourownlaptop.com in the last seven days, how many people are currently on the site, six of you, what times of the day they are, what countries they're from, all sorts of goodness. So we are going to go through and show you how to install it. It's pretty much copy and paste, super easy, great value, let's do it now.
So to sign up to Google Analytics go to analytics.google.com, you'll need to sign in with a gmail account. If you don't have one, they're free to get. But you're going to have to use one of these for this process. So create a gmail account if you don't already have one. And you go through the process of signing up, it's free. You'll end up somewhere like here. This changes quite often, so if your screen looks a little different don't worry, it's pretty easy, just follow the steps that Google gives you. Eventually, what you want to get to is having the Tracking Code. So let's follow me, just because we're trying to get it to work.
We're going to go to 'BYOL is Awesome' website. My account name, and my website name is the same. The url is www.byolisawesome.com Industry, pick one. Now I'm in the 'education', 'Jobs and Education' will do. And 'Reporting Zones', these can't be changed later on so make sure it is in the country that you want the reporting from. So I live in Ireland, but if I'm starting a site for the US, I want it to be US, because I want their day and night, because it will be weird to be checking on them, and you're like "Hey, why are they so active at 4 a.m.?" when actually, there, it's 7 p.m., depending on where you are in the world. Pick the Reporting Zone, not where you are but where the website, or most of the people of the website are going to be. So I'm going to leave mine in the United States.
Do I want to tick all these? I do. 'Get Tracking ID'; 'I agree'. Because what I want is this here, this is that main bit that I want. We click in here, we copy it, and then we jump into Dreamweaver. So here in Dreamweaver, I'm not going to open up these pages because I want it to be as part of a Template so I'm going to open up my Template now, I'm in this 'Files' tab here, you can open up your Template from within here because what I want to do, is I want it on every page. Now the user doesn't see it, and the stuff that the user doesn't see is in this Head tag. Body tag is our page that everybody sees, and the Head tag is just the code in the background. And put it where it tells us, in our case it tells us to put it just on every page. It used to have a specific space that it needed to go into. Where am I going to put mine? I'm going to put mine inside, maybe I want it to load just after these scripts here. Hit 'Paste', and you get this ugly bit of JavaScript.
The nice thing about it though is, if I save it, and 'update' these pages Awesome! Close that list, let's double check. It is in those pages. So I'm going to open up Index. Double check, it's in the Head somewhere. It will be grayed out, there it is there, nice. Portfolio Page, there it is there, great, they're all updating. So, now all I need to do is upload these two pages. So I'm going to close him down, and just upload them at the same time holding 'Command' to select them both, or 'Control' on a PC. And go to 'Put'. Would you like to put dependent files? I don't need to in this case because nothing's really changed except for the HTML pages No CSS changes, no Images, so it's going to be super quick.
Now, the disappointing bit, let's go have a little look. It's that the Tracking Code can take a little while to go. "No data received in the past 24 hours." That's fine. Let's see if we've got any Tracking Code straight away. Where you want to go to now, is go back to this Home button. And just make sure you're in your byolisawesome, or whatever one you're using. And down here, are there any people on my site? It's the only Tracking Code actually working, it's tested. Let's go to byolisawesome. Nice!
Get back to Analytics, and nothing is working. Come on, Google Analytics. Now, we're all disappointed, that's okay. The Analytics can take a little while to get going, give it a day, if it's still not working by then, you've got a problem. You reach out to me, and say, "Hey Dan, it's not working." We'll check through the Analytics FAQs to see if we can fix it. But I've never had it failed, really, it's a pretty solid, easy thing to do as long as you put it in the Head tag.
Now let's look at some of the other Analytics. Let's look at one of my other sites, let's see what I get. bringyourownlaptop.com I've got it called BYOL - Online. You can have multiple sites, free. And at the moment, there are five people on this site looking at different pages, and-- we're not going to get too deep into these details because, I don't know, I feel they're like personal details, kind of. So I mind sharing. You can start to see, all the details that I'm getting from people where people are coming from, the pages that they're on the most. This is the last seven days. So I can see things like the time of the day that most users are online. All sorts of goodness. Now this is not going to be Analytics course, we'll stick to it, just getting Analytics going. And yes, that's going to be us, Analytics, super easy to do super cool information about who's on your site.
Don't be disappointed at the beginning. This might look impressive, it's not. Five people on the site's pretty cool, one of the bigger sites I've ever made, but when you first go to the site you're going to be the only person visiting, then you're mum, and then your nanna, and then your brother's friend, and you might have, over the first few months, you might have only a couple of people, but as you grow your business, or your portfolio site, you start ranking better, all that sort of goodness will start getting detailed in here. All right, I'm muffling. Let's move on to the next video.