Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool from Google that provides basic analytical data and statistics for search engine optimization and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account.
It is a free web media analytics service offered by Google to track and report website traffic. It was launched by Google in November 2005. It is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. In combination with AdWords, users can now verify online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals can include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file.
Your analytics can recognize underperforming pages with methods like viewing the funnel, where visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographic position. Ecommerce reports show a site’s transactions, revenue, and many other metrics related to commerce. On September 29, 2011, it launched a real-time analysis, which allows the user to have information about the visitors who are currently on the site. A user can have 100 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to a website. It also provides several advanced features including custom visitor targeting. You can even have ecommerce reports that can track sales activity and performance. You are limited to sites that have traffic of less than 5 million page visitors per site, unless they are linked to an AdWords campaign.
Google Analytics is applied with “page tags”, in which case it is called the Google Analytics Tracking Code. Which is a snippet of JavaScript code that the website owner adds to each page of the website.
Google Analytics features include the following:
• Integration with other Google products, such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.
• Custom reports.
• Sharing and communication by email.
• Segmentation for subsets analysis, such as conversions.
It targets small and medium-sized retail websites. The service has limitations that make it less suitable for more complex websites and larger companies. For example, the system collects data through a JavaScript page tag inserted in the code of the pages on which the user wants to collect data. The page tag works like a web bug to collect information from visitors. However, because it depends on cookies, the system cannot collect data for users who have disabled them. Google also uses sampling in its reports instead of analyzing all the available data.
Additionally, some security experts have raised concerns about privacy issues with Google Analytics. Through the Google Analytics Dashboard, users can collect information about people whose websites link to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It automatically categorizes traffic as coming from a search engine if the referring URL is from your list of known search engines and there is a search term identified in that URL. This group includes both organic and paid search engine traffic. This is known as search engine traffic.
Also, Google Analytics for mobile will apply to mobile websites. The mobile package contains server-side tracking codes that use PHP, Java server page ASP, or Perl for their server-side language. However, many ad filtering programs and extensions and the Disconnect Mobile mobile app can block the Google Analytics tracking code. This prevents traffic and users from being tracked, creating holes in the collected data. These limitations are considered small and affect only a small percentage of visits.
