The basic of Google Analytics
Google analytics is one of the most powerful web analytics applications available. The best part of the application is that it is completely free. This particular article covers the basic of Google analytics and is just the basic to get started.
What is Google Analytics and Why use it?
Google Analytics is a way of monitoring various aspects of your online world. The meaning of this is that it allows us to monitor user acquisition, behaviour, and conversion. Analytics is a powerful application for tracking traffic patterns on your website. The fact that it’s an entirely free program, and integrates with other Google programs, like AdSense and AdWords, only makes it that much more valuable.
We use analytics to track what online behaviour led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions about how to reach new and existing customers. Different kinds of business can benefit from digital analytics:
- Publishers can use it to create a loyal, highly-engaged audience and to better align on-site advertising with user interests.
- E-commerce businesses can use digital analytics to understand customers’ online purchasing behavior and better market their products and services.
- Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with potential leads.
Google analytics is not limited to websites, it can be used on a variety of systems such as mobile applications, online point-of-sales systems, game consoles, customer management systems or other internet connected platforms.
How to install Analytics on your website?
It is very easy to get started with Google Analytics, first of all, you would need to register an account. Then you need to add a small piece of Javascript tracking code to each page of your site. Every time a user visits a web page, the tracking code will collect anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.
With WordPress you can use various plugins to add the javascript to your pages, you can have a look at analytics plugins here.
Processing and Reporting
When the tracking code collects data, it is packaged and sends it to google analytics to be processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and organizes the data based on particular criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop, or which browser they’re using.
But there are also configuration settings that allow you to customise how that data is processed. For example, you might want to apply a filter to make sure your data doesn’t include any internal company traffic or only includes data from a particular country or region that’s important to your business.
