Google Analytics is a free, user-friendly website traffic reporting and analysis tool provided by Google. It generates detailed information about visitors to the website, their traffic sources, referring search engine or website, google adsense earnings, and a lot more. If used in conjunction with the Google Adsense Reports, it is a powerful tool that you can use to optimize your earnings from your existing websites and blogsites, especially HubPages.

The reports Google Analytics generates are highly customizable. You may choose how the information is presented or displayed. You may also customize what information to include and exclude from the different reports. If properly set up and used with HubPages, it can tell you which of your hubs are getting frequent visitors, how often ads are being clicked, and most importanly, how much you are getting for each click: an invaluable information if you want to maximize your HubPages earnings.

If you know which of your hubs are getting constant ad clicks and which ones are getting high cost per click (CPC), you can adjust your strategy in earning more money with HubPages. You may write more hubs with a similar topic to the high earning hubs. You may take note of what advertisements are showing on those high-earning hubs and target those advertisements on another new hub. Or you may want to edit and modify your non-performing hubs to possibly increase their earnings. Experiment on new or additional tags. You may also experiment with geo-targetting since information is available on what part of the world the visitors to your hubs are coming from. The possibilities are endless and limited only by your own creativity.

But Google Analytics has to be set up properly before it becomes truly useful and provide you with the invaluable information that you need. Improper setup will make it useless. You will find that no report will come in from your hubs. This actually happened to me and I would like to share the experience so you may not make the same mistake that I did. I noticed on my Google Adsense Reports that I was getting three dollars ($3.00) on a single click and I wanted to know where the money was coming from. I went to my Google Analytics account and there was no report of it whatsoever - I made a mistake in creating the profile.

I would therefore like to show you how to properly setup Google Analytics for use with HubPages. It is very simple and only needs a few steps.

1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account - http://www.google.com/analytics.

2. Log in to your Google Analytics account and create a profile.

3. Track the website http://hubpages.com. You do not need to create independent profiles for each of your hubs. This is the most important - when you create a Google Analytics profile, enter the URL http://hubpages.com. You do not need to enter the URLs of your different hubs. Google Analytics will be able to track and report on all your existing hubs and any additional hubs that you write and publish with just this single URL information and a single profile.

4. Take note of the profile's UA-code. It is an ID of the form "UA-XXXXXXXX-X", where X stands for a number. It could look like this: UA-80083212-2. Go back to HubPages and go to the Affiliate Settings. Fill in required UA-code for Google Analytics.

5. It may take some time, maybe several hours before reports from your hubs come in.

• Make Money With HubPages - Getting Started Real Quick
• Make Money Online Writing Articles With HubPages
• Make Money Online - HubPages Versus Your Own Website
• How to Increase Traffic to your Websites or Hubs
• Google Adsense - How to Get Instant Approval as a Publisher
• Google Adsense and HubPages - Make Money Blogging
• Google Analytics - Maximize Your HubPages Earnings
• Google PageRank - How to Find Out a Website's PageRank