Introduction to Google Analytics. How does Google Analytics works?

Introduction to Google Analytics

Google Analytics originated from a web analytics firm called Urchin which was acquired by Google in late 2005. Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you track and analyze the performance of your website.

If you consider consumers purchasing goods in stages, we can look at digital analytics in terms of purchase funnel. Within the funnel there are stages that describe the customer interactions in steps. These steps are:

1. Acquisition – Generate interest in users.
2. ‌Behaviour – How much interest user taking.
3. ‌Conversion – User become a customer.

We get digits, measurements or figures from above stages, which helps into deciding marketing strategy

Google Analytics breaks down the reporting in a similar way. It allows us to track down consumer purchase behavior in stages and use data insights to make informed decisions about existing or new consumers.

All data is compiled in these Google Analytics Reports and it allows us to perform in-depth analysis to better understand the consumers and their journey.

How does Google Analytics works?

Let’s start understanding with how Google Analytics tracking process works. In order to track our website consumer interaction, we need to create a Google Analytics account which provides us a small piece of JavaScript code which then we include to our website. Every time user visits to the webpage, the tracking code collects anonymous information about the user and his/her interaction within the page/website.

Every time page loads, tracking code collects and send updated information about user’s activity. This activity gets grouped by Google Analytics into a period of time called “session”. A session begins when user navigates to a page that has the Google Analytics tracking code and ends with 30 minutes of inactivity. If user leaves the page and comes back, a new session will begin.

The tracking code, collects the data, packages it and sends to Google Analytics Engine to process as a report based on configuration in Google Analytics.

The most important thing to note within the data collection and processing of Google Analytics is that, once the analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed.

Google Analytics working:

• Once you add tracking code (JS code) on your website
• ‌Tracking code collects anonymous information about user activities
• It also ‌collects data from browser about: Language, Device, OS, traffic source.
• ‌Every time JS code gets triggered when user visit your website.