- Complete the Website Hosting Exercise and ensure your website is already hosted.
- Sign up for a Google Analytics account.
- Configure your hosted website to track pageviews and user events.
Login to your Google Analytics account.
From the admin settings (gear icon bottom left), create a new Web Property, called something like "Student Site" or "Analytics Exercise". If asked about business objectives, choose "Understand web and/or app traffic" and "View user engagement & retention".
From the "Start collecting data" page or the Web Property's settings page, set up a "Web" "Data Stream". Specify the URL to your hosted GitHub Pages site. Keep enhanced measurement turned on.
From the "Set up a Google tag" page, copy the provided code snippet, which resembles something like the following (using your own unique measurement identifier instead of "G-XXXXXXXX"):
<!-- Google tag (gtag.js) -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-XXXXXXXX"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'G-XXXXXXXX');
</script>As instructed, add your provided snippet to each of your website's HTML files, immediately after the opening <head> tag. In other words, it should be the first thing inside the <head> section. See also this guide about Adding the Google Analytics Tag to your site, which says "This code should appear immediately after the opening <head> tag. You need only one global snippet per page."
Save all the files, commit your changes, and push them to GitHub to trigger a re-build of your GitHub Pages site.
Then visit the hosted site and ask some friends to visit as well, and measure your pageviews in Google Analytics.
NOTE: in some cases, you may need to wait around 24-48 hours for the data to start collecting.
NOTE: page views and events will not be triggered by visitors who have disabled JavaScript via their browser settings or plugins.
NOTE: sending events is a bit of an advanced use case, so beginners can feel free to skip.
If you would like to send additional "event" data to Google Analytics, follow this Sending Events Guide.
See also the About events page for more information.