Google Analytics: All You Need to Know

For years, Google Analytics has become the favored tool for the complete analysis of websites. It has helped a number of website owners to find out and work on different aspects related to their websites.

If you want to know details about Google Analytics, go through the write-up until the end. We have covered what it is, its working, usage, benefits, and more.

Let’s get started!

Defining Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google for web analysis. It was launched in November 2005.  

You can utilize the service for tracking and analyzing how your website is performing. Google Analytics is present in free and paid versions, and anyone with a Google account can have access to it. 

Using this tool, you can obtain data and reports on how your website is performing, the scenario of your website traffic, and visitors’ behavior to the site. 

 

The Latest Version of Google Analytics

Since Google Analytics has come into existence, it has upgraded its versions several times.  

From 2012 until 2019, it has been working on the Universal Analytics.  

Google Analytics is presently working on its 4th version, Google Analytics 4, GA4. Google introduced this GA4 version in October 2020. 

Now the default version of Google Analytics is GA4.  

On March 22, Google revealed that it would cease processing new hits for the Universal Analytics properties on July 1, 2023. In order to continue using Google Analytics, users will have to upgrade to Google Analytics 4, GA4.

What GA4 is?

It is the fresh and updated version of Google analytics. It unites the data from apps and websites.

GA4 is the latest version of Google Analytics (GA) that combines data from both apps and websites.

For more transparency, the beta reporting platform App & Web is renamed to Google Analytics 4, GA4.

This present version of GA4 uses a better flexible and event-based model than the previous UA’s session-based model.

With the new version, you can get more accurate reporting, and with each interaction, more detailed reports will be passed to GA.

The Uses of Google Analytics

The primary function of Google Analytics is to trace the broad-ranging data related to your website and visitors to your site.

This data comprises the details of:

• How visitors are reaching your website 
• The way they interact with your content 
• The traits of the audience of your website
• How many visitors are converting into customers and 
• Other details. 

The obtained reports can be used to achieve the following things: 

• Analyze the data to evaluate the performance of your campaigns. 
• Find out the performance of individual pages so that you can optimize them accordingly.
• Determine who’s your targeted audience for content and marketing should be
• Trace the conversion and purchasing rates 

 

The Working of Google Analytics 

You are required to add a JavaScript code snippet to your website’s pages if you want to track your site. 

When the user adds this code to the website page and visits it, the code starts utilizing a javascript file to start data tracking and then sends it to Google Analytics. 

Once the data collection is completed, it is stored in a report within Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is useful for whom? 

GA is used to track SEO, pay-per-click, and other advertising efforts. Thus, it is more useful for online businesses and organizations to track how their marketing campaigns are performing. 

This is because they can easily get detailed data about their site’s performance, audience, user behavior, traffic status on your site, and others.

What and How Does Google Analytics Track? 

Previously in this post, we talked about Google Analytics helps to trace the website’s SEO, Advertising campaigns, PPC, and others. But what they actually are and how it happens. Let’s move ahead to know this.

SEO and PPC are two aspects of a website.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is the optimization of websites and web pages for Search engines. A number of techniques are involved in this to improvise the site’s performance. This advancement is needed to improve the search result ranking to attract more individuals to your site.

SEO Campaigns are run to find out the important targeting keywords searched by users so that you can create valuable content on those and make a user-friendly website to attract mass towards it.

Pay Per Click

On the contrary, Pay-per-click is a paid marketing platform you can track using Google Analytics. 

The system works on the basis of bidding, where company owners select keywords to bid for getting promotional places in sponsored search results. The advertising owners have to pay when someone clicks on their ads. 

Now, when you are clear of the working ways of tracking, you can enjoy the benefits of Google Analytics. 

The Benefits of Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides plentiful benefits for the owners of the websites.

Here, we are discussing some of them:

• The real-time data

 

You can notice the real-time data of your website with the help of Google Analytics.

The data can tell the number of individuals present on your website at any particular second; of those, it can tell how many are viewing from desktops and how many are from mobiles.

It can give you the data on page views per minute and second. It can tell where the traffic is coming from, the most active pages of your site, and even the location of the users accessing your website.

The data can tell what percentage of organic traffic is coming to your site and what percent is for referral traffic, direct traffic, and the traffic from your paid ads are coming to your site.

You can see the real-time data also for content visibility. At what time, audiences are viewing your content, and which content is bringing conversions.

The real-time data is important as it gives details about your site’s traffic and the user behavior with your site. It can help you understand where you need to focus and invest your energy and from where most traffic is coming.

• Know your audience

It is important to know your audience to find out how you can serve and target your audience. 

Google Analytics can help you determine the total number of your site’s visitors, the number of sessions completed by each user, the number of pages viewed by the user each session, and the moderate duration of each session.

It also displays the percentage of new and returning visitors to your website and the traffic fluctuation at a particular time.

It can help you know from which country the major audience belongs, the percentage of preferred languages by the users, which web browser the user is using, and even the details of the OS of their mobiles.

Google Analytics, with its audience option, lets you know the interests of your audience, suggest how they behave on your site, their involvement, and other details related to your audience.

Once you get to know everything about your audience, you will know what your audience admires and what they want. You can act according to their need and interests and provide content and products as per the requirement to make your website more engaging and attract more users towards it.

• Better manage your ads

As we all know, a Pay-Per-Click ad is a good way to attract traffic to your website. But how can you find out whether ads are performing?

It also can manage your Google ads by tracking the ads’ performance.

With Google Analytics, you can find how many clicks a particular ad gets, the price for each click, the total money spent on each campaign, and much more.

This is important as it helps you manage and track your campaigns, suggest how to spend, where to spend, if spending money is worth it, which ad is performing great, and which to stop.

• Better learning user behavior and interaction 

 

Using the Google Analytics behavior option, you can learn different aspects of your website. 

With this, you can determine how your website pages are performing overall. You can find out the most popular page on your site, the least performing, and the traffic on each page with time.  

It also provides the details of sessions, the site’s new users, bounce rate, and conversion of each page. 

Additionally, the behavior tab displays the site’s speed and the analysis of the exiting page. 

All these data help you analyze your site thoroughly and guide you to weak areas to work on, saving your time and efforts to wonder. It suggests the elements keeping users on a page. The analysis of the page between two different periods suggests how changes made to content affected the traffic.

• Track goals and conversions

Google Analytics help you to set goals for your website and businesses that you think can bring conversions. 

It helps you analyze your goals, keep track of them, the cost required to accomplish your goals, and more. 

The completion of advertising goals is one of the essential factors in any campaign. 

You can analyze your progress towards your goals and draw conclusions about why you aren’t reaching them.  

You can find out what conversions you achieved with the goals you set. 

 

To Conclude

Google Analytics is the service you can utilize to analyze your website and track its performance. It helps you work on your website as per the data obtained to attract more traffic and get more conversions. 

This was all about Google Analytics. We hope you can now answer what Google Analytics is, what are its uses, how it works, and its benefits.