If you are about to implement Google Analytics in your site or blog or you did it but you are not sure if you did it well here you have a detailed explanation about what do you have to configure and why at “Edit Profile Information“.
Once you click on Edit you will be driven to the following page.
The first field is “Profile Name“. Here you have to use a simple name that let you (and other people) know what is that profile about. I recommend having (at least) two profiles per site, one for the production account and the other for the Development profile. As you know any change on the configuration would modify your data for ever so it is important to make all the changes/improvements to the development profile first and once you are sure everything is working properly you change the production profile.
So in this case you can call My Site to the production profile and My Site Dev to the Development profile.
The next field is “Website URL” in this case you will write you site’s URL correctly as in the following example.
The next field is really important because it may produce problems on the way the information is displayed at the reporting interface. If you have a blog in wordpress your Defauld page may be the following.
The default page is the one the server display when a user type your url. For instance if you write www.analytics20.org my server will display www.analytics20.org/index.php whether or not “/index.php” is displayed.
So, if you don’t fill this field correctly (or don’t fill it at all) at your content report you will get www.analytics20.org and www.analytics20.org/index.php as two different pages, even when it is the same thing.
The fourth field is “Time zone“. This one is also important since will allow you understand not only at what time visit was carried on but also, in cases of visits near the beginning or end of a particular day, if the visit corresponds to this day, yesterday or the next day. As you can see this is not a minor issue since would completely change the way the information is processed.
The follow field is one of the less configured ones and one of the most important as well since could become a headache for you or your analysts. The query parameters are used to drive information from one page to another, so if you have a query parameter that collects the userid you need to configure Google Analytics (just from the GA side) to extract it. Why? Because if your page is www.analytics20.org/ and your parameter is userid Google Analytics will report the same page as many times as userid you have.
So your content report will look like:
/index.php?userid=1 2 visits
/index.php?userid=2 2 visits
/index.php?userid=3 2 visits
/index.php?userid=4 2 visits
and so on…
Once you fill this field with “userid” your content report will be:
/index.php 8 visits
Following you will be required to fill the Currency field. It looks simpple but take into consideration that you need to populate the same currency. So if you have an ecommerce site using different currencies you need to populate all the diferent prices in just one currency to Google Analytics.
Then you must select if your website has e-commerce or not. Please consider that if you select no the e-commerce report menu will not be displayed on your reporting interface. On the other hand if your site has no e-commerce and you select “Yes” the e-commerce report menu will appear on your reporting interface but will with no information.
If you want to track your internal search (search that users carry on into your site) select “Do track site search“.
Once you select site search you must fill what is the query parameter that your site uses.
You can get your query parameter as follows:
1- Search for a particular keyword (site).
2- Look the destination url and find your keyword. This website’s query parameter is s as you can see in the destination URL “http://www.analytics20.org/?s=site”
After that select if you want to strip query parameters out of the URL or not. If you select YES all the same url with different parameter “s” will be joined in just one page (which is normally the correct way).
In some cases next to the search box you have a drop down menu with options (like eBay). In those cases you have to select “YES” in the “Do you use categories for site search?” menu.
Then fill the category parameter (as “s” in the search box). In this case our parameter was “categoria” (which looks like “www.analytics20.org/index?s=site&categoria=analytics”)
Again, select if you want to strip it out or not. If YES you will group (at the content report) the same url with different parameters as the same page (all the visits toghether) otherwise you will have the same page repeated for every distinct category.
If your site has no search box google provide you one. You will need to copy and paste an small code so you need administrator access to the site server.
Save changes and voila!!!
Doubts or questions?