Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool offered by Google, designed to offer statistics and essential analytical features for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing endeavors. It's a component of the Google Marketing Platform and is accessible at no cost to individuals with a Google account.

Google Analytics serves the purpose of monitoring website performance and gathering insights about visitors. It assists organizations in identifying primary sources of user traffic, assessing the effectiveness of marketing efforts and campaigns, monitoring the accomplishment of specific goals (like purchases or cart additions), uncovering trends and patterns in user engagement, and capturing additional visitor data like demographics. Small and medium-sized online retail businesses frequently utilize Google Analytics to acquire and evaluate various customer behavior insights, which can be leveraged to enhance marketing campaigns, boost website traffic, and improve visitor retention.

How does Google Analytics work?

Google Analytics gathers user information from website visitors by utilizing page tags. These page tags consist of JavaScript code that gets embedded into the source code of each webpage. When a visitor loads a page, this JavaScript tag executes in their web browser, collecting data and transmitting it to one of Google's data collection servers. Subsequently, Google Analytics can produce customizable reports for monitoring and visualizing various data points, including user counts, bounce rates, average session durations, sessions categorized by channel, page views, goal achievements, and more.

The page tag operates in a manner similar to a web bug or web beacon, collecting visitor data. Nonetheless, because it relies on cookies, it cannot gather data from users who have disabled them.

Google Analytics offers a range of tools and capabilities designed to assist users in recognizing patterns and trends in how visitors interact with their websites. These functionalities encompass data gathering, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and seamless integration with other applications. The key features of Google Analytics comprise:

1. Data visualization and monitoring tools, such as dashboards, scorecards, and motion charts, which effectively illustrate changes in data over time.
2. Data filtering, manipulation, and funnel analysis to help users gain insights from their data.
3. Application program interfaces (APIs) for data collection.
4. Predictive analytics, intelligence, and anomaly detection to uncover valuable insights.
5. Segmentation options for dissecting subsets of data, like conversion statistics.
6. Customized reporting for various aspects, including advertising, acquisition, audience behavior, and conversions.
7. Email-based sharing and communication features for easy collaboration.
8. Seamless integration with other products, such as 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.

Within the Google Analytics dashboard, users can save profiles for multiple websites and view either default category details or select custom metrics to display for each site. Available tracking categories encompass content overview, keywords, referring sites, visitors overview, map overlay, and traffic sources overview.

This dashboard can be accessed on the Google Analytics site and is also accessible through a widget or a plugin for embedding into other websites. Users can even opt for customized Google Analytics dashboards provided by independent vendors.

Important metrics

A metric serves as a quantifiable standard for measurement. Google Analytics empowers users to monitor a diverse set of up to 200 metrics, offering insights into the performance of their websites. While the importance of specific metrics may vary depending on the nature of each business, the following are among the most commonly used metrics:

1. Users: A user refers to a unique or first-time visitor to the website.
2. Bounce rate: It represents the proportion of visitors who viewed only a single page, resulting in just one request sent to Google Analytics.
3. Sessions: These encompass a series of visitor interactions occurring within a 30-minute time frame.
4. Average session duration: This metric indicates the average time each visitor spends on the site.
5. Percentage of new sessions: It signifies the percentage of website visits that are first-time visits.
6. Pages per session: This metric reveals the average number of page views per session.
7. Goal completions: This measures how often visitors successfully accomplish a specified, desirable action, also known as a conversion.
8. Page views: It represents the total count of pages viewed.

Metrics vs. dimensions

Google Analytics reports are composed of dimensions and metrics, and it's crucial to grasp the distinction between them for a proper understanding of the reports.

Dimensions refer to qualitative attributes or labels used to describe and categorize data. For instance, if you're analyzing the average session length across various regions, the dimension would be "Region." On the other hand, a metric, which is a quantitative measurement, would be something like "Average session length."

Google Analytics allows for the customization of dimensions, and common examples include:

1. Language
2. Browser type
3. City and country
4. Device models
5. User age groups

Metrics, on the other hand, are quantitative measurements of a single data type. Examples of metrics encompass average session lengths, page views, pages per session, and average time on site. Metrics are employed to compare measurements across various dimensions.

Benefits and limitations