How to enable Google Analytics tracking

Almost anybody uses Google Analytics to track visitors of a website.
The very first question of a newbie who starts using Google Tag Manager is how to enable Analytics tracking.

If you are using the very basic implementation and you are not using any event tracking or e-commerce code, it is very easy to migrate your Analytics tracking to Google Tag Manager.

  1. First open Google Analytics and go to the admin area to grab your Analyics web property ID:
    Google Analytics: grab web property ID
  2. Now go to Google Tag Manager and open the container of your website
  3. Click on the new tag button at the top of the page:
    Google Tag Manager: add new tag
  4. Select Google Analytics from the list:
    Create Google Analytics tag 1
  5. Select Universal Analytics in the second step
  6. Enter your Analytics ID
  7. You can customize tracking here but if you are not using any special measurement it is enought to just enter your ID
  8. Select All pages in the Fire On step
  9. Save the new tag and enter a name

That’s it! Do not forget to remove any hard coded or somewhere enabled Analytics tracking. If you are using WordPress, you should first disable any Google Analytics plugins and check your theme settings. Some theme authors include the ability to enter your Analytics ID to include your tracking code without any other plugin.

It is important to check and remove any kind of tracking to ensure that you do not track your visitors twice or more that one time.

Once you removed any tracking on your site you can publish the new version of your Google Tag Manager container to continue tracking inside using Google Tag Manager.

If you are using any advanced tracking like events and/or e-commerce tracking there are other steps to do before you can change.