Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you analyze your website traffic.
For most companies, your website serves as a hub for all of your digital traffic. If you are running any marketing activities such as search ads or social media ads, your users are most likely going to visit your website somewhere along their user journey.
Given that your website is the central hub of your digital presence, your website is the best way to give you a holistic view of the effectiveness of all the campaigns you are running to promote your product/services online. Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track your digital marketing effectiveness.
Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. The code records various activities of your users when they visit your website, along with the attributes (such as age, gender, interests) of those users. It then sends all that information to the GA (Google Analytics) server once the user exits your website.
Next, Google Analytics aggregates the data collected from your website in multiple ways, primarily by four levels:
- User level (related to actions by each user)
- Session level (each individual visit)
- Pageview level (each individual page visited)
- Event level (button clicks, video views, etc)
There are two types of data that you can collect in Google Analytics:
- User Acquisition Data: data about your users before they visit your website
- User Behavior Data: data about your users when they visit your website