An Overview of Google Analytics

Guide

Feb 19

Getting started with the most popular free web analytics tool.

Before you’re ready to start running ads and driving revenue, it's crucial that your website is set up with basic tracking. Without this tracking, you’ll have no way of knowing how your ads are performing, what visitors are doing on your site, or even if your site is working at all!

Need help getting started? We’re here for you! Click below to schedule your Free Consultation.

Get Started

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google to help you analyze your website traffic. Over 50 million websites around the world use Google Analytics for insight into everything from behavior metrics like page load times, bounce rate, and average session duration to demographic insights like session location, language, and device type.

Google Analytics is also extremely user friendly with an easy-to-understand UI and native integration for almost all website building software (Shopify, Squarespace, WordPress etc.) Basic set up can typically be completed in less than 15 minutes and many of the 3rd party website builders require no code whatsoever. Simply paste in your Google Analytics tracking ID and you’re off to the races.

For a detailed guide on how to get started with Google Analytics, look no further than this helpful resource from Google’s support website.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1008015?hl=en

How Does Google Analytics Work?

At a high-level, Google Analytics works by embedding a JavaScript tracking script on the pages of your website. This script records the different activities users do on your site, sends that data back to Google’s servers, and then complies it with known attributes about those users such as age, gender, and interests.

From there, Google Aggregates the data into four views:

User Level
Session Level (also known as visits, users can have multiple sessions)
Pageview Level (users can visit multiple pages during their session)
Event Level (the most granular level, button clicks, form submissions, etc.)

Once this data is aggregated, it is available for you to review in the Google Analytics Platform. Note that there is no way to delete the underlying data once its collected.

Generating Insights:

Now that you have Google Analytics up on your site, how do you understand the data and produce meaningful insights? There is a lot to unpack here, but for now, we’ll cover the 5 main report types in Google Analyitcs and how to understand the output in terms of metrics and dimensions.

The 5 Report Types:

You’ll be able to report on your website traffic through 5 main views. These views can be accessed via the left-hand drop-down menus accessible anywhere in the Google Analytics platform.

Realtime:

Realtime does exactly what you think it does. It allows you to see both the count and certain details about the users that are currently accessing your site.

From this view you’ll be able to break down your current site visitors by location, source, content (pages visited), events, and conversions. Not only is it exciting to see your website being used in real-time, but this data is also incredibly helpful as you monitor your site for issues.

Audience:

The audience tab allows you to drill down into all available details Google has about the users that have visited your site. This is where you would go to answer questions like,” Which state or region drives the most traffic?” or “What device type yields the most transactions?”.

In general, you can break down your traffic by location, device details, interests & demographics, as well as behavior like new or returning. It is worth noting however that this data is void of any personally identifiable information (PII) so while you’ll be able to view visitor data in aggregate, out of the box you will not be able to tie this to an individual email or phone number.

Acquisition:

While the audience tab helps you understand who your visitors are, the acquisition tab provides a wealth of insight into how they reached your website. Within the acquisition tab, you will find the most benefit in viewing your traffic by source and medium.

Source refers to the location the user was before they came to your website. You can also think of this as the origin of your traffic. As an example, you may see traffic listed as direct which refers to users who came from no website and typed your website URL directly into the address bar.

You may also see traffic listed as Google. Traffic from this source clicked to your website from a listing on Google.

On the other hand, medium refers to how a user arrived at your site. Another way to think of this is the general category of the source. An example of a medium could be CPC (Cost per Click) which would indicate that this traffic clicked a paid ad to arrive at your site.

Together, source and medium paint a clear picture of where on the internet your traffic is coming from and how they are getting to you. To round it out with one more example, a user that clicked on a Facebook post and arrived at your site, would typically be listed with a source of Facebook and a medium of social media.

Behavior:

The behavior tab provides insight into how your users are interacting with your site. In this tab, you’ll find data on which pages your users are visiting, how fast your website is performing, and what elements of the site visitors are engaging with. You’ll also be able to see important details around your site search.

One thing of note is that you will need to appropriately tag elements of your site in order to view them as events in Google Analytics. Checkout this link from Google to get started with Google Tag Manager.

https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6103696?hl=en

Conversions:

The final tab in the Google Analytics reporting suite is conversions. This tab primarily allows you to see data around your site goals and provides insight into ecommerce performance both of which you will need to configure separately.

Metrics and Dimensions:

When looking at your data through any of the aforementioned views, you’ll be working with metrics and dimensions.

Metrics represent the actual statistics about the users of your site or the site itself.
- This can be things like page load time, number of visits, or bounce rate
Dimensions represent the various ways you can slice metrics to produce insights
- Examples include age, gender, time of day, and location

For the sake of example, let’s say you were interested in seeing the number of users that visited your site from the city of Atlanta. In this case, “Number of Users” is your metric and “City” is your dimension.

Conclusions:

In summary, Google Analytics is an insanely powerful and necessary tool to understand your website. For the price of exactly $0, you get insight into site performance, user behavior, and marketing performance. Not to mention. setup is incredibly simple with all popular web platforms offering out of the box integration.

With Google Analytics enabled you’ll be able to explore countless combinations of metrics and dimensions across the 5 different report types and view data from the user level all the way down to the individual event.