Google Analytics (GA) is a service from Google designed for webmasters and optimizers to analyze user behavior on a website. The information collected is placed on a remote server from Google. All that’s needed to connect to the system is to install a small JavaScript code on the pages of your site.
The service has both free and paid features. The free version of GA is able to analyze 5 million pages per month, which may not be enough to get an overall picture of sites. Therefore, sooner or later, most people still resort to using the paid Premium version. In this material, we will tell you what Google Analytics is and the capabilities of the service, the principles of its operation and the evaluation parameters it uses.
How Google Analytics works
Statistics is gathered using a Google Analytics counter on the company’s server. The so-called JavaScript counter code is placed on all pages of a web resource.
At the first stage users switch to a web resource via a mailing list, a link from other sites, a search engine result for some query, direct entry (where the user enters the name of the site in the address bar) or some other way. After the transition, they get to the website with the GA code. Here, information about them and their actions is automatically tracked and recorded (e.g., page URL, user’s device display resolution, session time, etc.). A list of cookies is then generated which will further identify the visitor.
The Google Analytics counter code not only monitors the user but also sends data about him to the servers for further processing.
After a certain period of time (about 1 hour for a small site of up to 50,000 pages) the server will process the data and update user reports in GA. Generating reports takes some time (from 3 hours to 2 days).
Google Analytics features
The service provides an impressive arsenal of tools to analyze various visitor parameters.
Multilingual interface. GA can show reports and documentation in different languages. Google has specialists who support any of the common languages, which allows users to use a powerful web analytics service without any problems, without any language barrier.
Huge user community. Service Google Analytics is a well-known product for estimating website traffic. It is used by millions of webmasters around the world. It does not matter how many pages any of the analyzed sites contain.
Both small businesses and huge corporations use the service. Google Analytics is universal because every business works by the same rules. It doesn’t matter if it has some specific goals, if the company has a very large or, on the contrary, a very small number of employees, if it occupies a narrow niche, etc.
