Using Google Analytics to understand your farm website

Since you spend precious time keeping your farm website fresh, you need to determine how effective your website is in engaging visitors. What sites do they come to your site from? What are they searching for on search engines when they visit? Do they visit from bookmarks or email referrals? How long do they stay when they visit? What pages do they like the best?

All of these questions can be answered using a web analytics package. The standard these days is Google Analytics mainly because it is free, but also because it is a very impressive piece of software that provides lots of detail on your website and it integrates well into other Google services.

Over the next few weeks, we are going to delve into using Google Analytics to understand the visitors to your farm website. What's bounce rate? How many visitors a day is a good rate? What is a referral? Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.

Installing Google Analytics on your website

The first step is getting Google Analytics the data it needs to track visitors to your site. The basic concept is that a small piece of code needs to reside on each page of your site. Obviously, this process differs based on how you developed your website and who hosts it. It may be difficult to do this if you developed your website yourself in pure HTML, but if you use Small Farm Central (or have advanced functionality on your site) it is easy. I am going to describe this process in relation to installing analytics on a Small Farm Central site, but the steps will be the same for any site except how the code is added to your pages.

1. Go to: http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html and sign in with an existing Google account or create a new account.
2. On the resulting screen, click "Sign up."
3. You will be asked for your "Website's URL." This is the address that your customers type in their browser to get to your farm website; such as http://www.yourfarm.com. The default for the account name is fine.
   
4. The next two screens will ask for your contact information and for you to agree to the user agreement.
   
5. The last screen gives produces the code that needs to be included on each page of your website -- you will see "Legacy Tracking Code (urchin.js)" about 1 inch down the left side of the page. Copy all the text in the textbox below which should look something like this:
   
   <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
   </script>
   <script type="text/javascript">
   _uacct = "UA-5555555-1";
   urchinTracker();
   </script>

Add the code to your website

Now we are ready to get the code on your website so the analytics package can start to record your stats. This process is different depending on how you developed your website; of course if you are running a Small Farm Central website, it is very easy. What follows is an explanation for farmers that are using the Small Farm Central system.

1. Log in to your control panel as usual.
2. Navigate to the "Script block" section of the control panel:
   Display / Template settings / script block
3. Paste the code from above into the text box provided, click submit. If there is any code existing in the text box, do not alter it. Simply paste below the existing text and click submit. Now the code will be included on every page requested by your visitors.

Take the time to add Google Analytics to your website now; in the next few weeks I will describe how to interpret your results. So, if you add the tracking code to your website, you will have something to look at when the go further into how to use the stats. Click here to get updates right in your inbox when we update the blog.

(Photo by el7bara)

You may also be interested in:
Getting right with google and other farm website visibility techniques
But I grow food not blogs - starting your farm blog
Add an interactive map to your farm website