What is Google Analytics?

Launched in 2005, Google Analytics is a web-based service provided by Google that tracks the activity of those visiting your website. It is part of the Google Marketing Platform. The service is free and is a perfect for service for beginners to use and many different metrics and dimensions can be accessed via the service. It also shows lots of visual data and charts allowing it to be accessible for many kinds of people. 

Analytics can show what is known as user acquisition data which refers to how a user of the website has come across the website (paid search engine results, unpaid search engine results, links or typing in the website address). This can then ensure that Google Analytics users can find out how much money that they need to be spending on paid results or if they need to work on gaining more organic visits since these can be favoured. Knowing this information can make a huge positive difference in website traffic.  

The service also shows user behaviour data. Google Analytics tracks the session duration of visitors to the website. This refers to the amount of time spent on the website by those clicking onto your page. It also tracks pages per session which refers to the number of pages clicked on by visitors and bounce rate which is the number of people who click straight off the website after visiting only one page. In addition, the service provides an insight into conversion (if the website is used to complete a specified task and the percentage of new users of the website. As well as this, analytics can also tell you about where the traffic to your website is coming from – whether it be from search engines or links to the website on other pages. It allows users of Google Analytics to gauge how successful their marketing and SEO is and can give businesses valuable information regarding the behaviour of potential customers. This can then make sure that marketing tactics can be more effective in the long run due to the insights the service provides to businesses. These insights are known as metrics which are measures of quantitative data and there can be up to 200 different metrics that Google can provide for users of the Analytics service. 

As well as metrics, Google Analytics can also provide dimensions for the users. Dimensions are pieces of qualitative data. Examples of dimensions can be the country/city of the visitors of the website, browser type and the devices that the website is being accessed through.  

Google Analytics can also track user demographics such as age and gender (also examples of dimensions) which can allow users of the service to ensure that their websites are reaching the correct target audience. 

Google Analytics runs using cookies that act as a web bug on the page to gather and provide information on the user’s activity. Due to the web bugs being cookies, it does mean that they are unable to provide this information if the user were to disable the cookies.