Part I – Installing Google Analytics in Miva Merchant

It is essential that you know the statistics behind your website visitors. You need to know where your traffic is coming from, how long they're staying, how many pages they are looking at, and what they are buying. This information will help you fine tune your site and get a much high conversion rate.

Luckily for us, our friends at Google have once again created a free product that will do all this and more. It is called Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is an online analytics software which tracks everything about your website visitors. It has the capability to show you where your visitors are coming from, what keywords they used to find your site, how many pages they looked at, and whether or not they made a purchase. Having this information is essential to optimizing and growing you online business.

One of the best parts about Google Analytics (besides the fact that it s free) is that installing it on your Miva site is simple and easy. Follow these steps and you will soon be learning everything you ever wanted to know about your website visitors.

Basic Google Analytics Setup

1. In order to use Google Analytics you need to create a free Analytics account with Google. Click this link http://www.google.com/analytics/  and sign up for an account. If you already have any previous Google account, such as Gmail, or Adwords, you should just be able to login using your same username and password.
2. Fill out the following information:

One thing to note here is the “http://”  in the drop down menu box. It will give you the choice of using http:// or https://. If your site uses an SSL (which is should if you are selling online) then you must select https://. This gives you a secure link to the JavaScript tracking code they are going to give you on the last screen of the signup process. If you do not select the https:// and your visitor enters a secure page on your website, they will get the popup error, “The page you are about to view contains unsecured items …”

After you have finished all the signup screens, you should get some JavaScript tracking code which looks similar to this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXXX-XX";
urchinTracker();
</script>

3. All you need to do now is add this tracking code to the global footer of you Miva Store.

A good place to add the tracking code is at the bottom of you global footer, after all your other HTML code.

Hit update and you are done. You now have installed Google Analytics on your Miva Store.

Important Things to Remember

This tracking code must to present on every page you wish to track. If you have static html pages outside of Miva (such as a static home page) then you need to add this code to the bottom of each of those pages as well, right before the </body> tag.

Once your tracking code has been added to your site, it takes 24 hours before the Analytics admin panel will start showing any traffic data. It needs this time to gather data about your site. This also means that the analytics data you are getting will always be 1 day behind.

Now all you have to do is sit back relax and wait for your traffic data. Once you have it, you need to put it to good use. Google has great help documents which show you how to use and analysis you traffic data. Visit http://www.google.com/support/analytics/ for more information.

About the Author: Brennan Heyde is an e-commerce consultant working in San Diego, Ca. He specializes in online marketing and SEO for e-commerce.  Have a struggling e-commerce website? – Contact Brennan today for a site analysis.