What is Google Analytics and How Does it Work?

A web analytics service that helps users with basic analytical tools and statistics related to SEO and for marketing purposes. Google Analytics service is available totally free with any Google account.

Purpose of Google Analytics

The main purpose of Google Analytics is tracking the performance of a website and collecting visitor insights. Organizations find the data extremely useful because it helps in determining the source of the website traffic. It helps in measuring the success of their SEO efforts, various marketing techniques and campaigns. It helps in tracking of goals, understanding trends and patterns in user behavior. Google analytics help in obtaining a lot of information related to user demographics as well.

Websites usually keep checking Google Analytics to understand their user behavior and it helps them in improving their marketing campaigns. With the correct analysis of Google Analytics data, users can actually drive website traffic and can also retain their visitors.

How Does it Work?

Using Page tags, Google Analytics gets user data from a website. In each page, a JavaScript page tag gets inserted. This specific tag runs in the browser of each visitor. It collects data and sends it to data collection servers of Google. With this done, Google Analytics can easily generate customizable reports. These reports help in tracking and visualizing data. This includes data like goal completions, session durations, number of users, page views, bounce rates and a lot more.

This page tag works quite like a web beacon or a web bug. It gathers visitor information but as it depends on cookies, the system might not be able to collect data if any user disables this.

In the present times, more than 30 million websites are using Google Analytics for monitoring their performance. The demand for people who are expert in Google analytics is increasing. Companies are now increasingly hiring people for setting up, managing and also understanding their analytics accounts.

Google Analytics helps users in getting traffic by first defining the main channels for traffic generation.

Understand your Website Traffic

Google Analytics is helpful in measuring traffic. It separates traffic for online channels so that marketers can understand their main source of traffic. It helps in understanding their main source of traffic.

• Organic – This is the traffic that comes from search
• Social – This is the traffic that gets directed to a website from social media platforms.
• Email – Traffic that comes through email marketing efforts
• Direct Traffic – This is the traffic that comes to a website directly by writing the domain directly or through bookmarks.
• Display – It helps in measuring traffic that comes from display ads.
• Paid – Helps in analysing traffic that comes from paid search efforts.

Understanding User Behavior:

Marketers need to know customer behaviour as well so that they know what changes they can bring in a website. It helps by providing data related to:

• Unique page views and page views
• Bounce rates
• Exit pages
• The average duration of a session
• Performance of top pages
• Site search
• Custom conversions and events

And a lot more.

Is Google Analytics Free?

Yes, it is free but those who wish to use advanced features, need to pay for the service.

Is it hard to learn Google Analytics?

Using Google Analytics may not always be easy to understand or learn. However, with regular usage and practice, it is easy to know what the traffic was in the last 30 days. However, to analyze certain other features like page category or traffic source, it needs a bit of knowledge and training.