Feeling like you don’t know what’s going on with your website is a terrible feeling.

The problem is you don’t have any idea about what’s going on and whether or not any of your creative efforts are generating results – or not.

And if they’re not generating results, then what are we all doing here? It’s easier to keep a journal in a Moleskine notebook and just go old school with pen and paper than to waste your time trying to build anything online.

And a lot less frustrating.

That’s why we set up Google Analytics & Search Console.

That way, you can get actionable information that means something and we can know how things are going.

Every website owner needs to track the health and performance of their website. So, in this lesson I’m covering how to get your Google Analytics & Search Console accounts set up.

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Part 10 of my in-depth WordPress training series covers ESSENTIAL tools you need to have set up for your site – Google Analytics & Search Console!

How To Set Up Google Analytics & Search Console

Welcome to the Building your WordPress framework series where we’re getting your site set up with some additional features and functionality so that you can get the most out of your new self hosted WordPress site. This video is actually we’re going to work on a couple different things in preparation for adding a couple different plugins to our website.

Right now, we’re going to go ahead and get set up with a Google Analytics account and get our site added to Google Search Console. Then we’re going to add those in another video to our WordPress site by using a plugin over there.

Let’s go ahead and get started. If you are not signed up for a Google Analytics account, you want to go ahead and do that. You can do that by going to https://www.google.com/analytics and go ahead and walk through the steps that you need to complete there to set up an account.

Once you get your account set up, you’re going to have the ability to add some a new account, a new property and a new view. You should have a screen that looks something like this.

We’re going to go ahead and create a new account for a new website. This is pretty straightforward stuff. This is going to be from http://mywpexample.com

The account is going to be My WP Example. Then we’re going to use this for both of our next two fields. We’ll do http://mywpexample.com

Once again, http://mywpexample.com. Then it gives you some options here for what you want to do in terms of, so just make sure you notice that. When you are typing this in, it’s giving you this as an example with your http:// you don’t actually need that on there, because it’s going to pre populate that for you.

That example there is just a little bit misleading. We’ll just leave that like that.

We’re going to go ahead and select our industry category. We’re going to select Internet and Telecom for our example. Then our time zone, we’re going to set to Eastern Time because I’m in Eastern Time.

Then we’re going to leave these set as far as the defaults are concerned, nothing really too crazy to get working there would just leave these as it is, and then we’re going to go ahead and click on Get tracking ID. That’s going to bring us to the Terms of Service page. Go ahead and agree to their terms by hitting I accept and you will be good to go there.

Now you’re going to end up with a page that looks like this. This right here is the number that you want to pay attention to. We’re going to be using this in our plugin once we get back to the dashboard and our WordPress site.

That’s really it. As far as getting your Google Analytics account set up is concerned, we’re not tracking any traffic yet because we have not established the connection between our website and between Google Analytics. That’s what we’re going to do with this tracking ID right here in our next video.

Keep note of this. What I like to do is just copy this and add it to a notepad document. Then that way, I’ve got it available to me when I’m getting it added back into my settings in my WordPress site.

That covers just the initial creation for what we’ve got for our Google Analytics account. You can see it’s really super simple, super easy to get that part set up.

Then the other part that we’re going to do is we’re going to get set up with Google Search Console. This is kind of two sides of the same coin here. Google Search Console is a performance based tool that will help you get some intelligent information about how your site is performing, like with keywords, and how your overall site health is.

Again, if you’re not signed up with Google Search Console, go ahead and get signed up for that. Then you want to go ahead and to get started, you want to add a new property. Here we are at the Add property screen.

We’re going to go ahead and get http://mywpexample.com added here. Then what is going to do is it’s going to ask you to get verified in your settings. You have a variety of different options to do this.

Now I’m going to show you a trick here that’s going to make everything a lot easier. Instead of downloading a file, what we’re going to do is find a domain name record that we’re going to add to our Cloudflare account over here.

It’s really easy to do this, because you’ve got an independent Cloudflare account that manages all those records for your domain name. This makes it a little bit easier for us to get this part verified on on the Google Search Console part.

We’re going to go ahead and click this and we’re going to– what this is asking for is, we’re going here to edit our domain name provider settings. That’s this last option, you click that. It’s going to bring you to this page here.

What I want to do, I’m not really worried about any of these domain names here personally. This is personalized information from a variety of different domain name registrar’s. All we want at this point is this record.

We’re going to scroll all the way down to the very bottom and click other. Then it gives us the record that we need to add to our DNS settings and Cloudflare.

It’s super simple. It’s super easy to do. All we’re going to do is copy this value out of this page, and we’re going to add it as a TXT record here to our account in Cloudflare.

Back over here, if you remember, a couple videos back, we set up our website and Cloudflare and we’re active now. We’re good to go.

This is the link that you want to use right here, this DNS link. We want to click on that. It gives us the ability to add a record.

If you remember, when we were setting up our Cloudflare account, it was asking us if we had missed anything, this is the same kind of screen where we have the ability to do the same kinds of things.

What we’re going to do is click this drop down here, and we’re going to go down until we find a TXT record or a  text record.

The name of it, all you need to do is put the @ symbol in there, which basically means that points towards the regular main domain. Then we’re going to click over here to add the text content. We’re going to paste in that value that we got from over there.

This full string of information here, we’re adding in here as the content for our TXT record. Go ahead and click save. We can leave this automatic TTL as it is, and then click Add and we’re done.

As you can see, when we put the @ symbol in this name field here, what it did was say, “Okay, for the parent domain for the main domain, we need to point this particular value to that particular record.”

We’re good to go there. Now we’ve got this. We can go over here and click Verify.

It really doesn’t take Cloudflare very long to populate this record. We’re going to go back over here, click on verify and we’re verified. That’s all it takes.

So Google Search Console and Google Analytics, we’re going to be working with those through our WordPress dashboard. Now we’ve got the account setup, and we’re good to go there.

The next one will be looking at getting our WordPress site connected to our Google Analytics and Google Search Console account.