Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google analytics enables website owners to analyze their visitors, with the objective of interpreting and optimizing website’s performance.

What is Google Analytics best used for?

Google Analytics is one of the top, most powerful tools out there for monitoring and analysing traffic on your website.It gives you an enormous amount of information about who is visiting your site, what they are looking for, and how they are getting to your site. As of 2019, Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the web. Google Analytics provides an SDK that allows gathering usage data from iOS and Android app, known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps.

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Google Analytics includes features that can help users identify trends and patterns in how visitors engage with their websites. Features enable data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting and integration with other applications.

Some Features Of Google Analytics

• data visualization and monitoring tools, including dashboards, scorecards and motion charts that display changes in data over time.
• data filtering, manipulation and funnel analysis.
• data collection application program interfaces (APIs).
• segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
• custom reports for advertising, acquisition, audience behavior and conversion.
• email-based sharing and communication.
• integration with other products, including Google Ads, Google Data Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google AdSense, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Display & Video 360, Google Ad Manager and Google Search Console.

What are the Metrics Of Google Analytics ?

The Following Metrics of Google Analytics are given Below:

1. Users. A user is a unique or new visitor to the website.
2. Bounce rate. The percentage of visitors who viewed only a single page. These visitors only triggered a single request to the Google Analytics server.
3. Sessions. The group of visitor interactions that happen in a 30-minute window of activity.
4. Average session duration. How long on average each visitor stays on the site.
5. Percentage of new sessions. The percentage of website visits that are first-time visits.
6. Pages per session. The average number of page views per each session.
7. Goal completions. The number of times visitors complete a specified, desirable action. This is also known as a conversion.
8. Page views. Total number of pages viewed.

Benefits Of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the top, most powerful tools out there for monitoring and analysing traffic on your website. and here are some of the benefits are given Below.

• Track online traffic.
• Analyze and understand user behavior.
• Get in-built data reports and option to customize reports with desired KPIs.
• Improve online ads with marketing analytics.
• Conversion tracking to track the required conversions.
• Segment the users effectively.
• Improve SEO and content marketing.
• Understand your Target Group.
• eCommerce performance analysis.
• It can Track goals.
• Suggestions to improve performance.
• Discover the right platforms for marketing.

Importance Of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very important digital marketing tool, but seriously underused by most businesses. It allows you to measure the results of individual campaigns in real-time, compare the data to previous periods, and so much more. Here are some of the reasons that you should be using Google Analytics to measure the success of your website. Being able to monitor all the platforms allows you to review what is working well in terms of advertising, and what isn’t.

Having all the data in one place makes it easy to compare the different channels. Google Analytics is used to track website activity such as session duration, pages per session and the bounce rate of individuals using the site, along with the information on the source of the traffic. It can be integrated with Google Ads,with which users can create and review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals).

In Google Analytics we can set four different types of goals

1. URL Destination goal
2. Visit Duration goals
3. Page/Visit goals
4. Events

Let’s Know about all these types in details:

URL Destination goals- This is one of the most commonly used types of goal. You will be using URL Destination goals a lot. URL Destination goals keep track of specific URLs and whenever someone visits the specified URL. The URL Destination goals are perfect for thank-you pages, confirmation pages, downloads, sales, etc. By tracking how many people reached that thank-you page, you will be able to track how many people purchased from you.

Visit Duration goals- Visit Duration goals are used to track how many people stay on your site for a specific amount of time. One important thing to remember is that you can use the Visit Duration goal type in two ways.

Pages/Visit goals- Instead of tracking how much time people spend on your website (Visit Duration goals), you can also track how many pages they visit before they leave your site (Pages/Visit goals). and this is similar as Visit goals.

Events- Events are slightly more tricky and complex than the three goal types we just explained. Setting up events may require you to add a JavaScript code to the element you want to track, e.g., a button click, playing a video, downloads, etc.

There are 5 Simple Ways to Setup Google Analytics

1. Step1: Google Tag Manager- is a free tag management system from Google. The way it works is simple: Google Tag Manager takes all the data on your website and sends it to other platforms such as Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics.
2. Step2: Create Google Analytics account- Like Google tag Manager we need to create a Google Analytics account also we need to make sure to Enter your account and website name, as well as the website’s URL.

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1. Step3: Set up analytics tag with Google Tag manager- We need to set up the Analytics tag with the Google tag Manager. In Google Tag Manager dashboard we need to click on the Add a new tag button and than we need to customize to areas of the Tag one is Configuration and Second one is Triggering than we will be taken to a new window where we will be able to enter in your Google Analytics tracking ID.
2. Step4:Set up Google Analytics goals – We need to set up the Google Analytics Goals atep by step.
3. Step5: Link to Google Search Console- Google Search Console is a powerful tool to help marketers and webmasters gain invaluable search metrics and data.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is available for free to anyone with a Google account.