Google Analytics

How Does Google Analytics Work?

The first step to understanding Google Analytics is to generate a tracking code to install on your website. This information will not be visible to the end-user, but will gather their data by depositing a cookie in their browser.

Initial overview

The initial overview of Google Analytics shows you basic statistics such as:

Users: Number of unique visitors to your website within a customizable time frame
Active users: Number of people who are currently viewing your website
Sessions: Number of interactions a viewer makes with your website, like clicking a page, making a purchase or downloading a file within a certain time period
Bounce rate: Number of visitors who clicked "back" or closed the window without performing any other interactions
Session duration: Amount of time the average user stays on your website
Location: A map view of your users' locations over a customizable time frame
Sessions by device: A ranked graph of the devices used to visit your site
Users by time of day: A graphic display of visitors' days and times

Reports

The reports section of Google Analytics displays five categories that detail how users interact with your website:

Realtime:

This report gives the same data as "active users" in the overview: the number of visitors at the moment you’re viewing the report. It also aggregates location, page views per minute, traffic sources, content, conversions and events to visualize the impact of something like a recent sale or product launch.

Audience

This report breaks down your viewer stats into finer details using metrics such as demographics, geographic location, engagement behavior and device usage. It also includes the option for customizable data.

Acquisition

This report shows how visitors find your website, including referrals, ad clicks, search queries, social media linking and specific campaigns. It includes organic search, paid search and social results.

Behavior

This report shows how users interact with the pages on your website through total page views, unique page views, how often and when users leave and the most frequently visited pages. The behavior flow chart details how a user navigates around your site, including how they enter, where they visit and how they exit. An "events" tab also features button clicks, video views and downloads.

Conversion

This report shows the number of times a user completes an action, such as making a purchase, signing up for an email newsletter or downloading an e-book or video. The most effective conversion reports might require additional customized plug-ins or tracking codes.

Why is Google Analytics Important?

Businesses that rely on a digital presence to gain new customers and retain existing ones need tools to analyze their digital marketing efforts. No matter what kind of content your website offers, visitors' behavior and interactions show whether your content is interesting or valuable—and if your product or service is worth buying.

Google Analytics’ benefits include:

1. It measures and optimizes website performance

The most fundamental metric of your digital marketing efforts is the number of visitors to your website and how that number matches your business goals. Every behavior data point beyond that helps you narrow and focus its impact.

This data can help you analyze trends on which pages are most popular and test if adding similar content might retain visitors and encourage new traffic. For example, if you are selling an e-book and find that your number of page visitors is drastically different from desired sales, you can use analytics data to relocate links or buttons to the download in order to better promote sales.

2. It determines your marketing strategy’s effectiveness

Whether your website is a mostly static presentation of basic company data or you’re constantly producing new content, analytics tools can help determine if your marketing dollars are being spent wisely—or if you should refocus efforts elsewhere.

Some of the most basic data points can help a new business shape their digital marketing strategy or assist an existing business with reaching more potential clients.

These include:

Number of visitors
Average time visitors stay on a page
Referring websites
Interests (keyword searches)
Geographic location

3. It directs content and product decisions

Because metrics help you understand how users visit your site, it can lead to tailoring their experiences. For example, if your most frequent visitors arrive via a mobile device, you might choose to focus most of your web design budget on optimizing your site for mobile user experience. Similarly, user location can help you determine if you can reach more visitors by offering your content in additional languages.

On the content side, if you opt to transition your website to be mostly videos, metrics will show how often your videos are watched and if they are viewed until the end, in addition to which types of customers are watching them the most.

4. It improves search engine results page (SERP) placement

Driving traffic to your site typically takes multiple approaches such as social media presence, conventional advertising and maximizing your search engine optimization results to bring more users via keyword searches. Google Analytics tells you how people find your site and the keyword searches that got them there. You can then use this information to make sure your website pages are showing up at the top of user searches more often.