What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. It's the most widely used website statistics service.

The basic service is free of charge and a premium version is available for a fee.

Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing, and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

Google Analytics features include:

• Data visualization tools including a dashboard, scorecards and motion charts, which display changes in data over time.
• Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
• Custom reports.
• Email-based sharing and communication.
• Integration with other Google products, such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.

Basics of Google Analytics

There are few terms you should know. You’ll see them often in your Google Analytics data, and I’ll use them throughout this post.

Dimensions— A dimension is a descriptive attribute or characteristic of an object that can be given different values. Browser, Exit Page, Screens and Session Duration are all examples of dimensions that appear by default in Google Analytics.

Metrics—Metrics are individual elements of a dimension that can be measured as a sum or a ratio. Screen views, Pages/Session and Average Session Duration are examples of metrics in Google Analytics.

Sessions— A session is the period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc., within a date range. All usage data (Screen views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.

Users—Users who have had at least one session within the selected date range. Includes both new and returning users.

Page views— Page views means the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are counted.

Pages/Session—Pages/session (Average Page Depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.

Avg. Session Duration— The average length of a session.

Bounce Rate—Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e., visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

New Sessions— An estimate of the percentage of first-time visits.

Goals—Goals let you measure how often users take or complete specific actions on your website.

Conversions—Conversions are the number of times goals have been completed on your website.

Campaigns—Campaigns (also known as custom campaigns) allow you to add parameters to any URL from your website to collect more information about your referral traffic.

Acquisition—Acquisition is how you acquire users.

Behavior—Behavior data helps you improve your content.