Do you want to know more about your visitors and how your content is performing?
Whether you run a website for a home business or a large corporation, Google Analytics is the industry standard for tracking, analyzing, and reporting site data.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. Google Analytics is offered also in two additional versions: the subscription based Google Analytics 360, previously Google Analytics Premium, targeted at enterprise users and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, an SDK that allows gathering usage data from iOS and Android Apps.
As a business owner or marketer, you understand the importance of having information that allows you to make informed decisions on how to grow your business. Whether you’re running a small grocery store in town or working at a large brand, the odds are, your business has a presence on the web.
You might be selling products online, running a blogger site, or just using your site to provide information about your services. But no matter the purpose of your website, you are going to understand the customer journey as they interact with your content/website.
Google Analytics does just that. It’s a free service with some premium options that helps you analyse visitor traffic and paints a complete picture of who are the audience and what are their needs. It’s a platform that connects to every page on your website. And through various dashboards and reports, you’ll have the opportunity to unlock tremendous data.
Google can provide you the routes of people that take to reach your site, the content they viewed, and even the devices they use to get there as well as demographic, geographic information of the user who have visited your website.
This software can also measure sales and goal conversions, say, getting someone to sign up for your newsletter. And with advanced tools such as funnels and attribution, you can see exactly how all the pages on your site are working with or against you. At its core, Google Analytics helps you to understand what’s working and what isn’t.
It gives you the insight of what you need to make the changes so you can meet your performance goals. You’ll be able to uncover the why behind the data. If you see a strong uptick in traffic, you might uncover the source as a blog you haven’t heard of.
If you’re seeing a strong decline, you might identify a problem with your site or a competitor that’s poaching traffic with better SEO or paid ads.
Let’s think about Google Analytics alongside your business objectives. In the online world, it can seem like there’s endless ideas. But I think we can boil online objectives into five common categories: E-commerce, lead generation, content publishing, online information, and branding. For E-commerce, your objective is to sell products or services.
You’ll use Google Analytics to find ways to increase those sales and track your performance over time. For lead generation, your aim is to collect user information, and you’ll test strategies and the landing pages to find a working combination.
For content publishers, the goal is to encourage repeat visits and engagement. So you’ll be tracking what keeps people clicking and interacting with the site. For online information, it’s important that users find what they’re looking for when they need it.
So you’ll be interested in what content they’re finding or not finding. And for branding, the key objective is awareness and loyalty. Is your site being shared, linked to, and engaged with on the greater web? It’s more than just looking at how many people visit your site.
That information is just a fraction of what you’ll need to make informed decisions. Every site will have actions, and Google Analytics tracks all of those actions. And then it boils it down into easy-to-understand reports.
Google Analytics is geared toward small and medium-sized retail websites. The service has limitations that make it less suited to more complex websites and larger enterprises.
For example, the system collects data through a JavaScript code inserted in the code of pages the user wants to collect data on. The page tag functions as a Web bug to gather visitor information. However, because it’s reliant on cookies, the system can’t collect data for users who have disabled them. Google also uses sampling in its reports rather than analyzing all available data.
This equips you with the right data to understand what you need to do to improve the outcome of your site.
Google Analytics is used by millions of business. Many of these business rely exclusively on Google Analytics for web analytics reports.
Google Analytics features include:
- Data visualization tools including a dashboard, scorecards and motion charts, which display changes in data over time.
- Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
- Custom reports.
- Email-based sharing and communication.
- Integration with other Google products, such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.
Google Analytics features include:
- Data visualization tools including a dashboard, scorecards and motion charts, which display changes in data over time.
- Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
- Custom reports.
- Email-based sharing and communication.
- Integration with other Google products, such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.
According to, some security experts have raised concerns about privacy issues in Google Analytics. Through the Google Analytics Dashboard, users can collect information of people whose websites link with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
To know more feature about Google Analytics click here.
Follow our other Article to know Common Terms used in Google Analytics.
Privacy policies and Google Analytics Terms of Service impact of Google Analytics Report:
Google Analytics doesn’t show a full picture of website activity. You won’t see details like usernames, bandwidth, broken links, clickpaths, or IP addresses in your Google Analytics reports.
Also, I want to put this on board, Your account may get suspended if you are trying to go against Google Analytics Privacy policies adn Google Analytics Terms of Service like collecting Information like usernames, bandwidth, clickpaths, IP addresses or other similar data by using google analysis tracking code.
To know more about google analytics privacy policies and Google Analytics Terms of Service kindly go through agreements.
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