Google Analytics Setup

Despite what your developer or webmaster tells you, place your Google Analytics Universal Analytics code into the HEAD section of every page on your website. The code is asynchronous and will absolutely not affect page load time. Challenging your webmaster on this topic will result in much greater accuracy in reporting data and recommended by Google themselves.

Next, we’ll need to insure that Goal tracking is properly setup, which might also upset your webmaster. Remember, you want to be able to quantify your efforts and online marketing costs. The only way to do this is to allow web analytics to track a keyword to a lead or sale.

This means, each form on the website should take your visitor to a corresponding confirmation or “thank you” page.

For the data to be accurate, you’ll need to make sure these confirmation pages aren’t linked to or indexed by search engines. To do this, the URLs will need to be removed from XML sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, and include the following tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics

Now that you’ve verified confirmation pages exist, aren’t indexed, and aren’t included in your sitemaps or internal hyperlinks, you’re ready to start recording goals.

Here’s Google’s official guide to setting up goals. Take as much time as needed to learn about, organize and track important actions user take on your website. There really isn’t any task in your SEO roadmap as important as tracking goals, period.

A few of the goals we have setup on this website include:

• Get Help Requests
• eBook Downloads
• Contact Us Forms

If you like knowing what visitors are doing on your website outside of goals alone, consider also tracking Events. Events might include:

• Video Views
• Field Options Selected in Forms
• Button Clicks
• Link Clicks

As part of your SEO roadmap, consider having a consultant or SEO specialist review your goal types, settings, and tracking configuration.