Google Analytics is a free tool by Google for website analytics that provides basic analytical data and statistics for search engine optimization and marketing purpose. The service is available to anyone with a Google account.
It is a free medium web analytics service which is 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 services on the Internet. Combined with AdWords, users can now be verified online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Objectives might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file.
Its analysis can recognize poorly performing pages with methods such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website and their geographical position. The e-commerce reports shows a site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics. On September 29, 2011, It launched a Real Time analytics, enabling a user to have insight about visitors currently on the site. A user can have 100 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to one website. Also it provides various advanced features which include custom visitor segmentation. It can even have e-commerce reporting can track sales activity and performance. It is limited to sites which have a traffic of less than 5 million page viewers per site unless 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 every 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.
• Email-based sharing and communication.
• Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.
It is brought toward small and medium-sized retail websites. The service has limitations that make it less suited to more complex websites and larger enterprises. For example, the system collects data through a JavaScript page tag inserted in the code of pages the user wants to collect data on. The page tag functions as a Web bug to gather visitor information. However, because it’s relying on cookies, the system can’t collect data for users who have disabled them. Google also uses sampling in its reports rather than analyzing all available data.
Furthermore, some security experts have raised concerns about privacy issues with Google Analytics. Through the Google Analytics Dashboard, users can collect information on people whose websites link to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. It automatically categorize traffic as coming from a search engine if the referring URL is from its list of known search engines and there is a search term identified in that URL. Both organic and paid search engine traffic is put into this group. This is known as Search Engine Traffic.
In addition, Google Analytics for Mobile to be applied to mobile websites. The Mobile Package contains server-side tracking codes that use PHP, Java Server Page ASP, or Perl for its server-side language. However, many ad filtering programs and extensions and the mobile phone app Disconnect Mobile can block the Google Analytics Tracking Code. This prevents some traffic and users from being tracked and leads to holes in the collected data. These limitations are considered small affecting only a small percentage of visits.
