What Is Google Analytics?

Date First Published: 26th January 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Services

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what Google Analytics is in this article.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that allows website owners to track and display website traffic along with other data, such as bounce rate, referral URL, average time on page, and demographic data in a report. Once analysed, this data can be used to provide insights into the visitor's experience, how to optimise the website, and other marketing aspects. As of 2019, Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics service on the web.

Features Of Google Analytics

Features of Google Analytics include:

• Reports - Google Analytics allows standard and custom reports to be viewed on each registered site. Standard reports contain information that is relevant for most websites and custom reports are defined by the user. The reports include data about the device profile used to access the site, demographic factors (e.g. age, gender), user profile, ad revenue, bounce rate, pages per session, session duration, referral source, and more.
• Realtime analysis - This provides data about the behaviour of the users who are currently on the website.
• Target audience analysis - Every website has a certain target audience, even if it is a non-commercial website. These are the users that the website content or products are targeted at.
• Acquisition - Acquisition refers to the recruitment of new visitors to the websites. This includes the links, ads, or websites that they came from, the first page that they visited, and the last page they visited before they left.
• Behaviour reports - This feature monitors actions that are taken by website visitors and displays the data in the behaviour report.
• A/B testing - This is the analysis of traffic data from two options about website design, pricing, and other important decisions.
• Analysis - After collecting the data, it has to be analysed to determine how goals are being met.

Advantages and Disadvantages Of Google Analytics

• The service is free to use and user-friendly.
• It offers a wide range of metrics and useful insights can be captured using this service.
• It contains other useful tools, including data visualisation, monitoring, predictive analysis, and the ability to integrate external data sources and other Google services with it, such as Google Ads and Google Search Console.

• The data collected may not be completely accurate. Users who block Google Analytics cookies and users with certain browser extensions and ad filtering add-ons will block the analytics code from running, preventing their data from being included in the reports.
• There are hit limits. The free version of Google Analytics has a limit of 10 million hits per month, per property. If a property sends more than 10 million hits per month, there is no guarantee that the excess hits will be processed.

Implementation

Google Analytics is implemented with "page tags", which is a snippet of JavaScript code that the website owner adds to every page of the website. The tracking code runs in the web browser when the page is loaded, collects visitor data, and sends it to a Google data collection server as part of a request for a web beacon.

In addition to sending information to a Google server, if cookies are enabled in the browser, the tracking code sets a first party cookie on each visitor's computer. This cookie stores anonymous information, including the Client ID.

History

Google Analytics was launched on 14th November 2005 and came from Google buying Urchin Software Corporation and its web statistics analysis software, Urchin in April 2005.

In October 2012, another new version of Google Analytics was announced, called Universal Analytics. The main differences from the previous versions were cross-platform tracking, tracking code to collect data from any device, and the introduction of custom metrics and custom dimensions.

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