What is Google Analytics? Google Analytics Review, Features

Google Analytics ("GA") is a free website traffic analysis tool launched by Google. Its predecessor was a business analysis tool called Urchin, which was acquired by Google in 2005 and then made available for free. Google Analytics mainly provides data statistics services for websites. It can collect statistics and analyze the access data of target websites and provide a variety of parameters for website owners to use.

About Google Analytics

In addition to standalone analytics, Google Analytics also has two additional versions: Google Analytics 360 for enterprise users and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, an SDK that allows the collection of usage data from iOS and Android apps.

Four major panels

1. Home Page

In the Home tab, customers can see:

1. The website defaults to the data of the last 7 days (the date range can be adjusted), including the number of users, number of sessions, bounce rate, dwell time and other data.

2. How many users are visiting your website in real time.

3. How much traffic does each channel source have, including natural search, direct entry, social traffic, referral traffic, search advertising traffic, and display advertising traffic.

4. The countries from which the website traffic comes, sorted from high to low.

5. Sort from high to low by the pages that users frequently visited in the past 7 days.

6. The traffic change curve of users visiting the website for one month and the devices used, including PCs, mobile devices, and tablets.

7. Website user stickiness.

8. Traffic conversion status.

9. The conversion effect of your advertising will be displayed at the bottom.

2. Custom Reports

The Report tab in Google Analytics gives you an in-depth look at the actual performance of your website so you can understand where improvements are needed. You can customize your own reports by monitoring the data, which is great for data monitoring and assessment of the operations team.

3. Real-time reporting

The Real-time Reports tab provides you with useful information about the current website visitors on your website, and you can get reports in real time. In the real-time overview, you can see the exact number of active users on your website, the number of website pages viewed per minute and per second, the top keywords used by active users, and the number of active users per page. In addition to the overview, you can also view other tabs in real-time: Locations, Traffic Sources, Content, Events, and Conversions in order to see the corresponding data about your active users, and also when testing whether the GA code is working.

4. Audience

In the Audience Overview tab, you can view the number of visits on your website during a specific time period, and you can choose to view hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly reports. Under the graph showing the number of sessions during a specific time period, you will be provided with additional information about your audience, including the number of users, pageviews, number of pages per session, average session duration, bounce rate, and percentage of new sessions. In addition, you will get a pie chart showing the ratio of new visitors to returning visitors. Under all these metrics, you can see where your website visitors come from (countries, cities) and the language they speak, as well as the browsers, service providers, and operating systems they use to visit your website. We can adjust our display advertising audiences, as well as Facebook advertising audiences, based on the characteristics of returning users and converted users.

5. Traffic Acquisition

The "Traffic Acquisition" tab mainly counts the sources of traffic from each channel, how many users each channel has, what the conversion is like, monitors the quality of traffic from each channel, and can determine whether the experience of placing keywords and landing pages is reasonable based on the residence time and conversion status of the traffic.

Advantages

1. Fast calculation speed

GA reports are very fast, and even if you add secondary dimensions or extend the time period, you can get results in seconds.

2. Comprehensive basic analysis functions

GA provides multiple standard reports, covering user number attributes, traffic acquisition, user behavior and conversion, etc., which can basically meet the needs of users to analyze and optimize users and sites from multiple dimensions.

3. Strong customization function

GA provides functions such as secondary dimensions, segmentation and custom reports, which can be used for data stripping, comparative analysis or creating new personalized reports to meet personalized data analysis needs and help users trace the source and find the mysteries in the data.

4. Improvement of relevant product lines

GA data can be combined with Google Sheets for analysis, imported into Data Studio for visualization, used with Google Tag Manager for advanced tracking, and combined with Adwords advertising. At the same time, Google provides many tools that can be combined with GA to connect data or implement complex functions.

How to use

1. Click here to log in, then click “Sign in to Analytics”.

2. Enter the page and click "Manage".

3. On the Google Analytics management page, create an account, select a website, fill in the basic information required by the website, and then click Get Tracking ID in the lower left corner.

4. Click the "Get ID" button to pop up the Google Analytics agreement, then check the box as required.

5. Install the Google Analytics code on your website. The code needs to appear on every page that users of your website can access and be added between <head> gtag.js</head>.

6. After installation, you can see the website access status in the background.