Fifth Step
Connect Website Analytics
You should now be the proud owner of a domain that shows nothing but security errors. It will take anywhere from two hours to two days for the connection to finish and the errors to clear up. The specific setup that we used with Cloudflare and short.io will make this process much faster, but it is always a bit unpredictable.
Try to avoid repeatedly checking on the domain to see if it loads. And don't give out your URL until the security errors have resolved. Otherwise, those errors will load into your browser cache. And after the errors do finally clear up, they will continue to show for some time. You will need to clear your browser cache when this happens. Avoid this problem when you are "peeking" at the website, by looking at it in a private browsing window.
While we are waiting, we are going to connect Google Analytics to your website so that we can monitor traffic. Browse to analytics.google.com and click through any confirmation messages. Check at the top right corner of the screen to make sure that you are logged in to the correct account.
Go to the settings cog at the bottom left hand of the screen, then click "+ Create" > "Property."
Type anything that you want into the Property name field. It will ask some additional questions about company size and market, that really only affect those who use this for paid advertising.
Next it will ask for the URL. We are only going to add one URL for each "Property." So you will need to create a second property if you are building two websites.
Next it will give you instructions for manually adding a "snippet" of HTML code into each page of your website that you want to be tracked in the analytics. That is incredibly tedious, but fortunately google sites has an amazingly quick workaround. So just click past that screen.
Once you have this screen that shows your "Measurement ID," we have all the information that we need to start tracking your website traffic. Copy that code that starts with "G-" and save it in your notes somewhere. It is easy enough to find it inside your google analytics account, but you want to have it handy any time that you make major changes to your website. So put it with your important numbers.
Go back to your google sites page, click on the "Navigation Settings" cog on the top left, select "Analytics," then paste your ID into the field and check enable. This is a simple but critical step that will give you significant amounts of data in the future. The more data you have, the more significant your OLD data even becomes. You want lots.
Every time you create a page in google sites you will need to do this-- even if you make a copy of a page that has analytics already enabled. The analyics ID will NOT automatically copy over. It is crucial to do this right away. Because if you do not, all of the data is lost. Your web traffic does not start getting tracked until you enter that ID into google sites. We will also have an additional layer of tracking of ALL of your website traffic through Cloudflare, but the detailed analytics for your main pages through google analytics will give you substantial amounts of valuable business insight. Below are some samples of the things I see in my Beast.Industries analytics page. It will take a while for things to start showing up, but it will be worth it.
The most powerful feature of google analytics is tracking "conversions," which you actually don't see on this account. (Otherwise there would be dollar amounts instead of $0.00 at the end.) You can have specific pages set as triggers where google analytics knows that a sale has been made. You can even connect this directly to your merchant services account. So you can track what web activity produces which results.
For most of those advanced tracking capabilities, you'd need to do a bit more setup. But this base configuration will give you a wealth of information. The biggest one being that it allows you to see traffic patterns, and which days and times are most busy on which pages.
For the sixth step, we are going to take another break from settings and administration and build the website out a little more with additional pages.