Google Analytics is a popular web analytics tool used for collecting various metrics about a website. The tool is completely free and available to every website owner. With its help, you can collect information about website traffic, user behavior, promotional effectiveness, and much more. Google Analytics is integrated with a website by adding tracking code to the page code, which works in the background.
Google Analytics displays information in report format. The service transforms the collected data into tables, graphs, and diagrams that can be used to evaluate the performance of the website. Reports can be customized to fit your needs and their appearance can be changed. Google Analytics reports can provide information about:
- traffic — its quantity, sources, and quality;
- user-behavior — which pages they visit, how much time they spend on them, and how they interact with the website's content;
- user characteristics — the location of people, their age, gender, language, and devices they use to access the website;
- conversions — how successfully users perform targeted actions;
- promotions — how much traffic the advertising campaign brought and how profitable it was;
- e-commerce — what products users buy, how much income they generate, and more.
The website owner can create reports for any period of time and compare them. Google Analytics even generates real-time reports, allowing you to see what is happening on the site right now. This will help you track changes in the site's performance in a timely manner. For example, after implementing a new feature, the site may stop working correctly, and this will be reflected in traffic indicators in the reports.
One particularly useful feature of Google Analytics is goal tracking. The website owner can specify which user actions the system should monitor, such as tracking who adds items to the shopping cart. Then this information can be used for marketing activities. Failure to achieve certain goals can inform the website owner about problems with the site or incorrectly configured tracking.
Google Analytics is suitable for both experienced and novice website owners. It is recommended to connect it immediately after launching the site. Smart owners use Google Analytics throughout their entire business. The capabilities of the service, along with its lack of cost, make Google Analytics one of the best web analytics tools.