What is Google Analytics? A Complete Guide

Google Analytics is mostly used as a tool for digital analytics. Data collection is a preliminary step for your reports. However, using your data to enhance your website and company works. Customizing your implementation might seem daunting initially, but even the default reports offer quick insights. Today, we will look at the basis of Google Analytics.

How do people use your website?  Visitor: Which marketing channels are utilized to visit your website? What is the most engaging and exciting content? Are people changing their mindset about the digital world? Google Analytics is a simple answer to these questions.

What is Google Analytics, how it works, and how to set up an account? Learn in this guide.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides tools for website performance and insights to track and report website traffic.

It is helpful for website owners, marketers, and businesses to understand how visitors interact with their websites and digital properties. With Google Analytics data, you can optimize web content, improve user experience, track marketing campaigns, and measure business goals.

What are Google Analytics Key Features?

Google Analytics helps you understand how people use your website or app. With this data, you can make data-driven decisions to improve user experience and optimize your online presence. 

Google Analytics key features include:

• Traffic Tracking: Measures website traffic, including the number of visitors, page views, and time spent on the site. 
• User Behavior Analysis: It provides insights into how users interact with your website, such as their navigation paths, engagement metrics, and conversion rates. 
• Audience Insights: Google Analytics offers demographic and geographic data about your website visitors, helping you understand your target audience. 
• Marketing Campaign Tracking: It helps you track the performance of your marketing campaigns, identify top performing channels, and measure ROI. 
• Data Visualization: Presents data in easy-to-understand reports and dashboards, allowing for quick analysis and identification of trends. 

Google Analytics uses a small piece of Javascript code placed on your website to track user interactions and send data to Google Analytics servers. Then later, it aggregates and organizes this data into reports and provides insights into website traffic and user behavior.

Here is how Google Analytics works:

1. Tracking Code:

When you set up Google Analytics for your site, you get a unique tracking code. This code is a snippet of JavaScript that you embed on every page of your website. It’s the starting point for collecting data about your visitors.

2. Data Collection:

Every time someone visits a page on your website, the tracking code sends data to Google Analytics. This data can include:

• Page views: Which pages are being visited.
• Session data: How long a user stays on your site and what actions they take.
• User data: Information like location, device type, browser, and sometimes demographic details (if enabled).
• Event tracking: If you set up specific events (like button clicks or form submissions), the code will track those as well.

3. Data Processing:

After the data is collected, Google Analytics processes it by organizing and filtering the raw information. This step helps it make sense of everything and ensures it shows up in a way that’s easy to understand.

4. Reporting:

Once the data is processed, it’s displayed in various reports within the Google Analytics dashboard. There are a lot of metrics you can look at, including:

• Audience: Information about who is visiting (age, interests, geographic location).
• Acquisition: How visitors are finding your site (organic search, paid ads, social media).
• Behavior: What visitors are doing on your site (page views, time on site, bounce rate).
• Conversions: How well your site is meeting its goals (form submissions, product purchases).

5. Insights and Actions:

With all the collected data, you can use Google Analytics to:

• Identify patterns ( which content is most popular).
• Optimize user experience (improving pages with high bounce rates).
• Track marketing efforts (see if a campaign is driving traffic or conversions).
• Make informed decisions to improve your website’s performance.

In Google Analytics, a metric is a quantitative measurement, like a number, percentage, or ratio, that quantifies website or app performance and user behavior. 

These metrics help you understand how users interact with your website, identify areas for improvement, and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. 

Important Google Analytics metrics include:

• Users: The number of unique visitors to your website.
• Sessions: The total number of sessions on your website or app.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page.
• Average Session Duration: The average time users spend on your website per session.
• Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (e.g., purchase, signup).
• Event Count: The number of times a specific event is triggered.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the latest version of Google’s analytics platform which track and analyze user behavior across websites and apps. 

It has more advanced features and flexibility compared to its predecessor, Universal Analytics. Unlike Universal Analytics, which primarily uses session-based tracking, GA4 is built around events. Every interaction, whether it’s a pageview, button click, or video play, is tracked as an event. This gives you more flexibility in tracking user behavior.

You should use Google Analytics for multiple reasons, each one motivating your digital strategy. It estimates your website’s performance and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It categorizes users by age, gender, country, device, and so on to determine who is more active.

Why Use Google Analytics?

• Understand User Behavior: Learn what your visitors are doing on your website and how to improve their experience.
• Optimize Marketing Efforts: Measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns to improve ROI.
• Measure Business Success: Track conversions and set goals to monitor how well you’re meeting your business objectives.
• Free and Scalable: It’s free to use for basic features, and it can scale with your business as it grows.

Setting up an Analytics account can be challenging, but once you do, you will discover a lot of information. You can save time and effort by automating data collection and analysis with analytics. Consider these steps for setting it up.

• Step 1: Encourage Google Tag Manager.
• Step 2: Structure a Google Analytics account.
• Step 3: Use Google Tag Manager to configure analytics tags.
• Step 4: Create goals.
• Step 5: Connect to Google Search Console.

Step 1: Encourage Google Tag Manager

A free tag management tool available from Google gathers information from your website and shares it with other platforms, like Facebook Analytics and Google Analytics.

• The first step is to create an account on the Google Tag Manager dashboard.

• Press ‘’Enter’’ on your account name and click the “Continue” button. You will then create a container, which Google describes as a bucket containing your website’s ‘macros, rules, and tags.
• In this context, ‘macros’ refer to predefined variables that can simplify tag configuration, ‘rules’ are conditions that determine when tags fire, and ‘tags’ are snippets of code that collect and send data to other platforms.

• Give your container a descriptive name and choose the type of content it will associate with: Web, iOS, Android, or AMP. Once completed, click “Create“, read the Terms of Service, and agree to them. You will then be given the container’s installation code.

• To manage your tags, you must paste this code into the backend of your website. Copy and paste the two snippets of code into each website page. According to the instructions, you should place the first one in the header and the second after the body’s opening. If you are using WordPress, simply paste the two pieces of code into your theme.

Step 2: Set up a Google Analytics Account

• You must create an account by signing up on its page.

• Now, enter your account, URL, and other website information. Ensure it selects your website’s industry category and the time zone for reporting.

• Once you have completed those steps, accept the terms and conditions for receiving your tracking ID.

This ID is unique to your website and contains sensitive information about your website’s traffic and user behavior. Sharing it could compromise your website’s data privacy and security. Once you have obtained the tracking ID, proceed to the next step.

Step 3: Use Google Tag Manager to Configure Analytics Tags

You will now learn how to set up specific tracking tags for your website.

• Visit your Google Tag Manager dashboard and select the Add a new tag button.

• You will be directed to a page where you can create your new website tag. You will notice that you can customize two areas of your tag:

• Where will the tag’s data be stored?
• What kind of data do you want to collect?

• Press the “Tag Configuration” button to select the type of tag you want to generate. To create a tag for Google Analytics, select the “Universal Analytics” option.

• When you click on that, you can select the data type you wish to track. From the dropdown menu, navigate to “Google Analytics Settings” and select “New Variable’’.

• After that, a new window will open and ask for your Google Analytics tracking ID. It will deliver your website’s data directly into Google Analytics, which you can view later.

• Once completed, navigate to the “Triggering” section and select the data you want to send to Google Analytics. To proceed to the “Choose a trigger” page, click the Triggering button, just as you did with “Configuration.” From here, select “All Pages” to send data from your web pages.

• Finally, your new tag setup should look like this:

• Simply click the “Save button“, and you are done! You now have a new Google Tag tracking your website and sending data to your Google Analytics page! We’re not done yet, though. You still need to establish your goals, which leads us to…

Step 4: Establish goals for Google Analytics

While you are probably familiar with your website’s and business’s key performance indicators, you must tell Google what success looks like for your website by setting goals. Begin by clicking on the “Admin” button in the lower left corner of the dashboard.

• When you do, you will be taken to another window where you can find the “Goals” button.

• When you click that button, the “Goals” dashboard will open, allowing you to set new objectives.

• From now on, you can browse various goal templates to determine which best fits your intended objective. Additionally, you must decide on the kind of goal you wish to achieve.

• From there, you can refine your objectives even further, determining, for example, the precise duration visitors must spend on your website before you can declare it victorious. Once you’re done, save the goal, and Google Analytics will start tracking it for you!

Step 5: Connect to the Google Search Console

Google Search Console lets web admins and marketers obtain priceless search metrics and data. Check the search crawl errors and rate of your website, among other things. The analysis Google performs on your webpage: Check the pages on your website that link from within and outside the site. See which search engine queries your website ranks for.

• Click the “Gear” icon in the main dashboard’s lower left corner to configure it.

• Next, select “Property Settings” from the column in the middle.

• After swiping down, select “Adjust search console.”

• This is where you can begin adding your website to the Google Search Console.

• After selecting the “Add button“, this page will be displayed to you. Select the button that says “Add a site to the Search Console” at the bottom.

• This is where you add a new website to the Google Search Console. After putting in the name of your website, click “Add“.

• To incorporate the HTML code into your website, adhere to the instructions. You should be returned to it after completing that and clicking “Save.”

You will not see your data instantly, so return later to view the data from the Google Search Console.

Next steps once Google Analytics is configured

A free tool from Google named Google Analytics helps website owners estimate user behavior. Businesses can make better decisions to enhance their online presence and marketing strategies by analyzing user behavior.

It requires multiple steps for setup; it handles tag management without requiring manual code updates. To get a unique tracking ID, create an account, enter your website’s information, and proceed. Set up tags to gather information and connect them to your tracking ID.

Establish the precise actions you wish to monitor, like form submissions or purchases. Get helpful information about the search engine performance of your website, including metrics and data.

Once you set up an Analytics account with Google, that will give businesses deep insights into their websites’ performance, users’ demographics, and marketing campaigns’ effectiveness. This allows them to optimize their online strategies effectively.