What Does Google Analytics Do?

What is web analytics?

Web analytics involves the collection, measurement, and analysis of website data. Web analytics tools can provide lots of useful information about the origin of website traffic, how website users navigate and interact throughout a website, what content and web pages they’re most engaged with, and how they exit the site.

What’s the importance of Google Analytics?

There are many reasons why using analytics tools is a no-brainer for digital marketers today. Here are three of the more important reasons:

It helps you make data-led decisions

Marketers can use the data uncovered by analytics tools to optimize the performance of their channels and websites by taking data-driven decisions.

These are actions we take to improve performance based on our understanding of the data we’ve recorded; that is, the data is leading the decision. For example, if you find out that one of your blogs gets a lot of traffic, optimize the page to get the most out of it by adding pop-ups and including links to other related articles.

Using data is an effective way to use rational thought to improve performance. While it’s best practice to follow data-led decisions, we must always remind ourselves to ‘trust but verify’.

It makes reporting easier

Apart from helping with decision-making, web analytics is an important information source to help marketers report back to key stakeholders on how campaigns and websites are performing in relation to your digital marketing efforts.

Ultimately, marketers are trying to recreate scenarios that lead to commercial outcomes for their organizations or clients. You can do this by measuring and acting on the data trends you observe using web analytics software.

It helps you figure out the ‘story’ behind the data

One of the real values of web data analysis is that it allows you to deduce the ‘story’ behind the data to gain valuable insights and enhance business performance.

But how exactly does this lead to commercial returns? Well, web analytics can help you understand your customers better and see their journey across your channels. It tells you who they are, where they’re coming from, and what their interests are. It tells you about their demographics and location. It also helps reveal any conversion challenges that might exist on your website. It helps you appreciate what consumers like or don’t like, and how they interact on your website.

You can use all this information to improve the experience on your site for the consumer and to optimize the channels that consumers use to visit your website.

Web Analytics Tools

There are numerous analytics tools available on the market today. Some of them are free and some require a paid subscription. Paid and free analytics products will differ in terms of support, features, and functionality.

Some examples of analytics packages that are available include:

• Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360, which are part of the Google Marketing Platform
• Adobe Analytics
• Woopra
• Kissmetrics
• Webtrends
• Matomo

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By : Vayxi