What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides basic statistics and analysis tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. Moreover, The service is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is free for anyone with a Google account.
Google Analytics is used to monitor website performance and collect visitor views. It can help businesses identify key sources of customer traffic, measure the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising campaigns, monitor achievement of goals (e.g. purchases, products added to “shopping cart”), patterns and trends in observing customer activity and obtaining information about other visitors. like demographics. Small and medium business websites often use Google Analytics to obtain and analyze various user behavior studies that can be used to improve marketing campaigns, improve website traffic and retain visitors.
How does Google Analytics works?
Although, Google Analytics collects user data from each website visitor through the use of page tags. A JavaScript page tag is added to the code of each page. Likely, This beacon works in each visitor’s web browser, collects data and sends it to one of Google’s data collection servers. Google Analytics can generate customizable reports to track and visualize data such as number of users, bounce rate, average session length, sessions by channel, page views, conversions by intent and more.
Further more, The page tag works like a web bug or a web beacon to collect visitor information. However, because it relies on cookies, the system cannot collect data for users who have disabled them.
Google Analytics includes features that help users identify trends and patterns in how visitors interact with their websites. Features enable data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and integration with other applications. These features include:
- data visualization and monitoring tools, dashboards, scorecards, and animated charts that show changes in data over time;
- data funnel filtering, manipulation and analysis;
- application program interfaces (APIs) for data collection;
- predictive analytics, intelligence and anomaly detection;
- Segmentation to analyze subcategories such as transitions;
- customized reports on advertising, acquisition, audience behavior and conversion;
- sharing and communicating via email; And
- Integration with other products including Google Ads, Google Data Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google AdSense, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Display & Video 360, Google Ad Manager and Google Search Console.
In the Google Analytics dashboard, users can save profiles for multiple websites and view default category details or choose custom metrics to display for each website. Categories available for tracking include content summary, keywords, referrals, visitor summary, map overlay, and traffic source summary.
The dashboard is available for viewing on the Google Analytics website and as a widget or plugin for integration with other websites. Custom Google Analytics dashboards are also available from independent vendors.
Important Metrics:
A metric is a numerical measurement standard. Google Analytics allows users to find up to 200 different metrics to measure the performance of their website. Although, Some metrics may be more important to some businesses than others, but here are some of the most popular metrics:
Users. A user is a unique or new visitor to the website.
Speed of production. The percentage of visitors who viewed only one page. Moreover, These visitors only send one request to the Google Analytics server.
Preparations A group of visitor interactions that occur within a 30-minute window of activity.
Average session length. On average, how long each guest stays at the property.
The percentage of new sessions. The percentage of top site visits.
Pages per session. Average page views per session.
Complete the project. Some visitors take the desired action. This is also called transition.
Page views. The total number of pages viewed.
Metric vs Dimension:
Moreover, Google Analytics reports include metrics and metrics. Understanding the difference between them is important to the correct interpretation of the reports.
Dimensions. These are attributes or symbols used to describe and organize data. For example, if the class length is measured in all directions, the measure is “Area.” “Session duration”, a measure, is an example of a metric.
Although, Google Analytics metrics can be customised. Examples of common sizes include:
language;
types of research;
city and country;
mechanical engineering; and
age group of users.
Measurements. These are the parameters of a data type. Examples of metrics include average session length, page views, pages per session and average time on site.