it's time to actually set up your Google Analytics account and begin collecting data.

We'll cover creating an account and getting the tracking code

and then you'll practice making your own test account.

While we won't cover every single configuration,

we'll review the most common features that you should use to customize analytics for

your specific business.

When you first set up your Google Analytics account,

you'll be asked to choose whether you want to track a website or a mobile application.

Depending on your choice,

Google Analytics will display instructions to add the correct code to collect your data.

If you're tracking a website,

you receive a piece of JavaScript code that you must add to every page on the site you

want to track.

It's best to add this code to the top of the page,

before the closing head tag.

If your website uses a template you can add the code directly to the site template.

If you're tracking a mobile application

you will download a Mobile Software Development Kit, or SDK,

and share it with your development team.

There's an SDK for the Android platform as well as iOS.

You can learn more about tracking apps in our developer documentation.

Once you add the code to your site,

you should start to see data immediately in the Real Time reports.

But there are other ways to add the Google Analytics tracking code to a site.

One way is using a tag management tool.

If you're unfamiliar with tag management,

it's a fairly new technology that makes it easy to control and implement different types

of JavaScript tags,

like the Google AdWords tag, DoubleClick tags or the Google Analytics tag.

Visit the Google Tag Manager Help Center to learn more about this technology.

In addition to tag management,

some platforms also make implementation easier by providing plugins to simplify the tagging

process.

Plugins on sites like Blogger, Wordpress or Drupal,

simply require you to input your analytics ID in the administrative settings, and the

platform takes care of the tagging from there.

Alright, now it's your turn to create the test account that you will use for the activities

throughout this unit.

Use the information in the lesson activity

to complete the first page of the account set-up process.

If you have questions, refer to the resources in this lesson to get help.

Okay, let's get started!