What is Google Analytics?
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, it's the best way to give you a holistic view of the effectiveness of all the campaigns you are running to promote your products or services online. Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track your digital marketing effectiveness.
Google Analytics places a small piece of JavaScript measurement code on each page of your website. Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code collects pseudonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.
It also collects attributes about those users — such as age, gender, and interests — along with browser language, browser type, and the device and operating system they're using.
That information is then sent to Google Analytics servers where it's processed and organized into reports.
GA4 uses an event-based tracking model to collect and process user interactions across both websites and apps. Data is aggregated primarily across 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.)
- User Acquisition Data: data about your users before they visit your website
- User Behavior Data: data about your users when they visit your website