Learning about Google Analytics is necessary for people who want to work in SEO or digital marketing. Let’s first define what is Google Analytics. Besides, if you own a blog site, you may be interested to know how your audience is engaging with your site. Let’s first define what is google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a tracking tool offered by Google for free. It provides information about visitors to a website as well as the performance of the site. For example, if you own an e-commerce store. With the help of Google Analytics, you will know how many users visit a page that sells gift items vs a page that sells toys, where these visitors come from, which sources generate these visitors to your site, what devices your visitors use, and much more. The newest version of Google Analytics is Google Analytics 4.
How does Google Analytics work?
Google Analytics obtains user data from each website visitor with the help of page tags. This is a JavaScript page tag that is inserted into the code of each page. This tag runs the browsers of each website visitor, collects data, packages this data, and sends it to Google Analytics to generate reports. These reports provide valuable insights into a website like the number of visitors, bounce rates, average session durations, page views, sessions by channel, goal completions, and more. The page tags act like web bugs and rely on cookies while collecting data. So if a user disables cookies, the page tags cannot acquire data.
Google Analytics has features that help users identify how visitors interact with their websites over time. Features facilitate data collection, evaluation, monitoring, understanding, reporting, and incorporation with other applications. These features are
- Tools like dashboards, scorecards, and activity charts for data visualization, and monitoring. These tools also demonstrate how data changes over time.
- Filtration, alteration, and analysis of channels of data
- APIs or application program interfaces for data collecting
- Useful insights, intelligence, and detection of anomalies
- Segmentation of subsets of data for analysis
- Custom reports for advertising, audience attainment, audience habits, and conversion.
- Communication through email, and
- Integration with Google Data Studio, Google Ads, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google Optimize 360, Google AdSense, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Search Console, Google Display & Video 360, and Google Ad Manager.
In the Google Analytics dashboard, a distinctive set of metrics as a website profile can be displayed and saved. . Not only one website, users can save profiles for multiple websites. The profile of a website is filled with default categories of metrics or custom metrics selected by the user.
Several categories of metrics are keywords, content overview, visitors overview, referring sites, traffic sources overview, and map overlay. The dashboard is accessible through the Google Analytics website. In addition, a plugin or a widget is available for integrating the dashboard into other sites. Independent vendors also provide customized Google Analytics dashboards.
Benefits and Limitations of Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers distinct advantages but is also not free of disadvantages. The benefits of this platform are
- Free, powerful, and easy to use for beginner users
- Google Analytics is capable of capturing an extensive range of useful information.
- Google Analytics is loaded with various metrics and customizable dimensions.
- The platform also features other tools like data reporting, data visualization, data monitoring, predictive analysis, etc.
Limitations
- The users who block Google Analytics cookies, apply Ad Filtering tools and use some browsers plugins, and private networks, lower their data’s accuracy and precision.
- Samples of half a million random sessions are used to reduce the server load in order to generate reports. These reports show an error margin of only the total number of visitors. This implies that an extensive error margin may exist even in a small number of data.
