Google Analytics

Google Analytics definition: What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics platform you can use to track and analyze the performance of your website or app. Through Google Analytics, you can access a wide range of data and reports on website traffic and website visitor behavior. The platform is available to anyone with a Google account, and there are both paid and free versions.

What is Google Analytics used for?

Google Analytics tracks a wide range of data about your website and site visitors. This data includes:

• How users arrive on your website
• How users interact with your website content
• The characteristics of your website’s audience
• How many of your website visitors convert
• and much more

You can use the reports within Google Analytics to accomplish things such as:

• Evaluating the performance of your marketing campaigns
• Determining how your pages are performing and how to optimize your pages
• Deciding who you should target your content and marketing to
• Tracking conversions and purchases

Who can benefit from Google Analytics?

Since Google Analytics is used to track search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), and other marketing efforts, it is the most beneficial to companies with an online presence that want to track their marketing campaigns.

With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to glean important information about your audience, visitor behavior on your site, traffic patterns, and more. Plus, you can access and analyze data fast with Google Analytics’ data sampling feature.

Whether you opt for the free or paid version, you can gain fantastic insight into how your customers interact with your website. All you have to do is set up Google Analytics to get started.

Data Processing

Google Analytics doesn’t present you with the raw data the platform collects. It first processes data and then generates reports. The first stage of data processing is the separation of data by users and sessions.

• User Data — This is data on different, distinct visitors to your site. Google Analytics creates a unique, random user ID for each new visitor to your site. If the same user revisits your website in the future, Analytics recognizes the user ID. 

They will then be logged as a ‘returning’ visitor; this only works if they visit using the same device. The process can be subverted if they clear your cookie from their browser cache.

• Session Data — A session is a period of time that a user spends on your site. It begins with a pageview hit when the user first visits the website, and it continues until they ultimately leave the site. During each session, Analytics collects a host of different types of session data.

That session data includes the pages visited, actions taken, and time spent on your site. You can use this data to gain insights into site user behavior. It can be critical to understanding site performance, as we’ll talk about below. 

Dimension

A descriptive attribute or characteristic of data. Browser, Landing Page and Campaign are all examples of default dimensions in Analytics.

The additional parameter in the report for more accurate analysis is an advanced dimension in Google Analytics.

About attribution reports

Once you’ve set up conversion tracking, you’ll have access to attribution reports, a handy set of reports about your conversions (those important actions your customers take on your website, such as a purchase or email signup).

Benefits

Attribution reports show you the paths customers take to complete conversions and provide insights into how your different advertising efforts work together to create conversions. For example, you can see whether certain keywords assisted conversions that eventually happened through other keywords. This gives you a better sense of your potential customers’ conversion paths than just looking at the last-clicked keyword.

On the Attribution Overview report, you can get a high-level view of the conversion paths. The report shows how many days, ad clicks, and ad impressions, on average, it took users to convert.

Is Google Analytics still relevant?

It provides you with valuable insights that can be used to improve the performance of your website and increase conversions. Despite the fact that there are so many other another analytics management platforms, Google Analytics remains a free highly relevant solution for managing the analytics of your website.