Google Analytics 101: What is Google Analytics, How does it work, and more

If you’re reading this, chances are that you want to learn more about Google Analytics. This is a great first step! GA does an incredible job of helping business owners make sense of all the data coming in on their website. There are several basic concepts that we will cover in this post, including Google Analytics 101 (what is it?), how does Google Analytics work?, the difference between dimensions and metrics in GA (an important one), and how to utilize the data available on Google Analytics.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

This post is going to be slightly longer, but I’ll give you a brief explanation of the several basic concepts of Google Analytics. There are three sections that we will focus on:

1. Google Analytics 101 (what is it?)
2. How to install Google Analytics
3. How does it work?
4. Difference between dimensions and metrics in GA (an important one)
5. How to utilize the data available on GA.

Google Analytics 101

Whatever kind of campaign you’re running for your business in the digital world, let it be social media ads or search engine ads, the customer is likely going to visit your website somewhere in their journey and that’s what makes your website the “HUB” of your business.

Because your website is the HUB of your business, it will be able to show you a whole picture of how effective your campaigns are to promote your business to the online world.

Google Analytics generates insightful reports by collecting a wide range of data, and that’s how it gives you an image related to your site’s performance.

How to install Google Analytics?

Follow the basic Google Analytics installation process.

• Sign up for a free account at Google Analytics
• Create your property ID in Google Analytics
• Enter the website’s URL and click on the “Save & Continue” button to create a profile for that site. You can also enter specific pages of your website, like blog page or product store if you want more focused monitoring. Clicking Save & Continue will take you to another dashboard where it shows created properties along with their assigned profiles. If there are any errors while saving the data, then those are clearly shown as well so no worries! Now just follow these steps mentioned below:
• Add The Tracking Code To Your Website. It’s very important that you add Google Analytics tracking code to every page of your website, so go ahead and take a minute or two to do this. Simply click on the “Admin” tab at the top menu then choose “Tracking Info & Settings. Make sure to be logged in with an admin account when doing this step for Google Analytics settings in order for it to work properly. (If not logged in as Administrator, log in first).

Google Analytics is one of the most important tools that can help marketers gauge how well their marketing channels are performing by measuring traffic sources, conversion rates, and more! And today I will show you just what these mysteries mean using Google Analytics.

How does Google Analytics work?

It collects data from four sources:

• The Google Analytics tracking code on your site which measures the traffic to and interactions with a website;
• Information about users collected through cookies, such as their IP address, device type, language settings, etc.;
• Data related to ads that appear next to or near content on the web; and
• Demographic information like age range) so it can provide you with valuable insights into how people interact with your business online. For example, Google Analytics helps companies understand more about what’s going on in front of them by measuring who visits a page when they’re doing market research for potential customers.

They also record attributes like age, gender, and interests.

Google Analytics code is placed on the site of a webmaster to track traffic, which includes: information about users collected through cookies such as their IP address or device type; data related to ads that appear next to content on the web; demographic information like age range) so it can provide you with valuable insights into how people interact with your business online. For example, Google Analytics helps companies understand more about what’s going on in front of them by measuring who visits a page when they’re doing market research for potential customers.

GA clusters the data collected from your website in primarily four different levels

• Pages (total number of pages, page depth)
• Users (number of users who land on a given web property from organic search or other channels such as retargeting)
• Events (button clicks or video views that happen when someone is viewing your site), Conversions/Goal Completions, and Ecommerce Transactions. Google Analytics also has an audience insights tool that provides demographic information like age range for people visiting certain parts of your website. You can use this to measure how well content is reaching different personas based on their demographics. This allows you to tailor what you’re offering in terms of products, services, and marketing messaging accordingly! These are just some basic examples — GA can do much more than this.
• Sessions (Individual visit) A session is defined as a grouping of interactions that one user takes during a given time period on your website. This would include things like a page view, event completion (a user completing an e-commerce transaction on the site), or bounce rate.

Difference between Dimensions and Metrics

In a nutshell, dimensions are attributes of your data and, metrics are quantitive measurements. Dimensions are typically used for grouping data, while metrics measure a particular thing.

For example: if you wanted to figure out how many people clicked on your social media posts, Google Analytics will count this as one metric, and provide that number in the form of “Conversions.” Dimensions can be applied to these numbers by using something like ‘Social Media Posts’ or ‘Reach,” which is just another dimension under Conversions. This allows us more ways to break down our data when looking at it from different perspectives!

How to utilize the data that’s available on Google Analytics

Unfortunately, Google Analytics is a pretty complex program and there are just so many different things you can do with it. The best thing to do for most people would be to use one of the pre-built templates that will help you identify your goals or figure out what content on your site might need some tweaking — all without having any knowledge about actually using this tool!

To use the data available in GA, first, we need to segment the data into two parts, User Acquisition Data and User Behavior Data.

User Acquisition Data is data that tells you how many people have visited your site. This includes the number of sessions, pages per session, and pageviews. Google Analytics also lets us know about the goals for each visitor which will help to categorize what steps in our conversion process they are on — if we want them to be a customer or not.

The User Behavior Data is more focused on the content available on your site rather than visitors themselves — it breaks down any information related to interactions between users and their experience with different parts of your website (including engagement). It can tell you where the traffic came from, what browsers or devices are being used, what content was interacted with etcetera! User Behavior Data can help you improve your conversion rate and accomplish the goals your business sets out for.

We’ll talk about How Google Analytics can help UX designers in the next post of this series. ( *please stay tuned for my next post ;) )