It is impossible to enhance something if it isn’t measured. That is why it is critical to employ the appropriate analytics tool to measure your site’s performance. Google Analytics is one of the most popular website analytic tools out there. It is an advanced digital analytics tool that can provide the insight you need to improve your website.
There are so many reasons why Google Analytics is exceptional, one of them being that it costs $0. Another significant benefit for site owners is the simplicity with which it may be implemented. Almost every site owner is technically capable of using this tool with the right guide, which I will provide below.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics (GA) is used to track website performance and gather information about its visitors. Anyone with a Google account can use the service for free. It allows you to determine the top sources of user traffic, assess the performance of your marketing activities and campaigns, tracks goal completions, identify patterns and trends in user engagement, and obtain other visitor data such as demographics.
Businesses use Google Analytics to collect and analyze various customer behavior data that can be utilized to optimize marketing campaigns, generate website traffic, and better retain customers.
For instance, if you own an eCommerce store, Google Analytics can help you see how many people are visiting your store, where they’re coming from, what device they’re using, and much more.
What Google Analytics Does
Google analytics does four things.
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Data Collection
To collect data from websites, Google Analytics employs a JavaScript script. When a user accesses a page with the Google Analytics code, GA records a visit. Each “action” that you want to track requires an additional code.
How Google Analytics Collects Website Data
Google Analytics provides significant insight into user behavior and collects valuable user data in real-time, from a website’s traffic sources to the number of hits each month.
GA transmits this information to Google’s servers using the JavaScript programming language.
You may notice that when you visit a website, the text, photos, and other data on each page are saved in HTML format, which your browser decodes and displays.
JavaScript enables your computer to send and receive messages from other computers on the internet. When you visit a website that uses Google Analytics, your computer will be asked to download some Google Analytics JavaScript instructions.
As a result of that code, your browser will be asked to transfer some critical data to Google’s servers. These data may include the page you’re on, technical information about your device, how you got to the site, and how you navigate the site, and more.
This may seem worrying because of privacy issues. Fortunately, Google Analytics is designed so that such information is provided anonymously rather than collecting information about a single user and linking it to their name.
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Data Processing
Once a user’s interactions have been collected, Google Analytics begins the data processing procedure to turn the raw data into information. Each data section is evaluated individually to process them. That is, they are segmented in terms of their characteristics.
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Settings
Raw data is subjected to Google Analytics’ settings (such as filters). Once it has been processed GA saves the data to its database. It’s impossible to change your data once they’ve been processed and stored in the database, however, you’ll be able to control how its displays in the GA profiles you’ve set up in your account.
Report generation
Google Analytics generates reports on the performance of your website. The generated reports can be accessed via the Google Analytics Web Service, or other places that require the use of the reporting APIs.
What Can You Learn From Google Analytics?
There’s so much you can learn about your website with Google Analytics. The tool has a lot of capabilities, from gathering information about your clients to tracking the performance of your website.
Here are some examples of what you can learn using Google Analytics:
- Discover which countries bring in the most visitors.
- See how many people converted on your website.
- Discover the devices and browsers users use to access your website.
- Measure how your marketing and ads campaigns are performing.
- Discover which countries bring in the most visitors.
- Obtain information about consumers’ preferences and demographics and much more
Types of Google Analytics Reports
Real-Time Report
The real-time report allows you to check the status of your website in real-time. You can see who’s on your site and what they are doing at that particular moment on your dashboard.
Under ‘Overview’, you can see your website’s most popular pages, as well as the number of visitors to those pages in real-time and the country from which they came.
Real-time reports are also useful for assessing the performance of your campaign and making faster improvements.
Audience Reports
Google Analytics’ Audience report allows you to know how old your visitors are or what device they’re using to access your website. This report provides so much information to allow you to understand your visitors. You can utilize the Demographics report, for example, to determine the age and gender of your visitors.
Acquisition reports
Acquisition reports are particularly beneficial when you’re first getting started with Google Analytics. It will show you how visitors arrive at your website. It covers your traffic sources like organic search, direct traffic, referral traffic, or social media traffic.
Behavior Report
When it comes to determining what your visitors are doing on your website, the Behavior report in Google Analytics is the place to go. It will show you a snapshot of your visitors’ behavior in its Overview.
What You Can Track with Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to track almost every aspect of your website. Here’s a list of the top 10 metrics you can track with Google analytics.
- Users
- Bounce Rate
- Sessions
- Pageviews
- Pageviews by Page
- Percentage of New Sessions
- Sessions by Channel
- Average Session Duration
- Goal Completions
- Pages Per Session
Conversion Report
The conversion report tells you how well your website is converting visitors. It tells you the number of visitors that performed the desired action. For instance, how many visitors bought from you, how many visitors signed up for your newsletter, and more?
Getting Started
Google Analytics is no doubt one of the best analytics tools out there. If you want to implement Google Analytics for your website, this article will walk you through the process.