Google Analytics is a powerful and comprehensive free(mium) tool that you can use to gain information about the visitors to your website. Using Google Analytics, you can determine demographic and geographic details about your customers, as well as their behavior on your site. Since there is a lot to learn about Google Analytics, we'll be doing a short series about the tool that includes more than one post. We'll show you how to get started and how to analyze some of the data that you collect for your site. The first post in our Google Analytics series will walk you through the basic setup process to collect tracking information for your website.

Before you begin, you'll need a Google account. Once you have an account set up:

Go to Google Analytics to get started at https://www.google.com/analytics/web/
Click on the 'Admin' tab at the top center of the page
Create a new account
Fill out the boxes highlighted in red and provide the URL for your site
Determine whether you want your site's data to be included for Google's use. If so, leave the boxes checked and click the blue 'Get Tracking ID' button.
Once you set up your new ID, go back to the Admin screen. You should now see your Account (the first column) and your website will be listed as your Property (the second column).
Under Property, click 'Tracking Info' and then 'Tracking Code' to see the code.
Copy the code from the first box. This is your Universal Analytics tracking information.
Paste the code on every page of your site. If you have a Squarespace site, you can do a code injection with this code on the header.
To check that the code was pasted correctly and that you're collecting data, click on the 'Reporting' tab at the top. Next, click on 'Real Time' and then 'Overview' on the left. If you are on your website, the number should be at least 1.

Good luck! We want to make Google Analytics as easy as possible. If you still have questions, please let us know. You can email us at info@silvershadegroup.com or fill out our contact form.