Programmers Sample Guide: Google Analytics Setup for website and how it can help ?

Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. Google Analytics shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. With this information, you can improve your website return on investment, increase conversions, and make more money on the web

Step by Step Process to Setup Google Analytics for your website

1) Google Analytics is a free product. Click here to Signup!

2) Add your website for tracking

Click on the link Add new account link on the analytics home page and add your website information such as URL and Title.

Then add a profile to your account. What's the difference between a profile and an account?

An account is a collection of profiles.
A profile is a group of rules and settings that define the reports that you see. These include goal and filter settings, default page and website URL values, and user access levels. Goal and filter settings, particularly, have a big effect on the data displayed in your reports.

3) Find the asynchronous snippet for your profile

The tracking code is profile-specific, so you can only access it from the Profile Settings screen for that profile. Go to Analytics Settings and click "Edit" next to the profile used for your site. In the Profile Settings page, click the "Check Status" link. You'll see something similar to the code snippet below, where XXXXX-YY indicates the profile ID for your Analytics account.

<script type="text/javascript">
  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();
</script>

TIP: If you want to set a different URL to be tracked by google analytics than the one displayed by the browser for that page

then replace the following code
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

with
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/directory1/directory2/filename.html']);

4) Copy and place the code snippet

Once you find the code snippet, copy and paste it into your web page, just before the closing </head> tag. If your website uses templates to generate pages, enter it just before the closing </head> tag in the file that contains the <head> section.

5) Verify your google analytics setup

It generally takes 24 hours for data to appear in your Google Analytics account after you've installed the tracking code. Here's how to confirm that you've entered the tracking code correctly in the meantime:

See the "Check Status" icon at the top of the Profile Settings page

Google Analytics itself checks to see that the tracking code has been installed correctly on your site. Once you've created a new profile, the "Check Status" icon displays a warning icon, "Tracking status unknown," until the system detects the code. Learn what the different status icons mean.

Check your reports

Select your website profile, click View reports and change the date. To do this, click the date widget on the dashboard and change the date to the day you set up the tracking code. If you do this just a few hours after setting up the tracking code, you probably won't see much data. However, if you see some site usage statistics, this means your Analytics profile is receiving data for your website and tracking is working.

Programmers Sample Guide

Google Analytics Setup for website and how it can help ?