What is Google Analytics? | Digital Marketing Institute

Key Takeaways

hi I'm Brian Kim I'm an IT engineer who has worked in media financial information and most recently for an algorithmic trading firm web analytics involves the collection measurement and analysis of website data web analytics tools can provide a lot of information about the origin of website traffic how website users navigate and interacts throughout a website what content and web pages they're most engaged with and how they exit this site marketers can use this data to optimize the performance of their channels and websites by taking data led decisions these are actions we take to improve performance based on our understanding of the data we've recorded that is the data is leading the decision this is a very effective way to use rational thought to improve performance while it's best practice to follow data lead decisions we must always remind ourselves to trust but verify apart from helping with decision making web analytics is an important information source to help marketers report back to key stakeholders on how campaigns and websites are performing in relation to your digital marketing efforts ultimately marketers are trying to recreate scenarios that lead to commercial outcomes for their organizations or clients you can do this by measuring and acting on the data trends you observe using web analytics software one of the real values of web data analysis is that it allows you to deduce the story behind the data in order to gain valuable insights and enhance business performance but how exactly does this lead to commercial returns well web analytics can help you understand your customers better it tells you who they are where they're coming from and what their interests are it tells you about their demographics and location it also helps reveal any conversion challenges that might exist on your website it helps you appreciate what consumers like or don't like and how they interact on your website you can use all this information to prove the experience on your site for the consumer and to optimize the channels that consumers use to visit your website there are a number of analytics tools available on the market today some of them are free some of them require a paid subscription paid analytics products and free analytics products will differ in terms of support features and functionality some examples of analytics packages that are available include Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360 which are part of the Google marketing platform Adobe Analytics rubra KISSmetrics web trends and peewit the market leader and most commonly used analytics program is the free version of Google Analytics or GA as it is sometimes known the paid version of GA called Google Analytics 360 offers some additional functionality in terms of report validity and sample sizes but it's mainly used for websites that receive over 10 million pageviews per month for the vast majority of websites the free version of Google Analytics is perfectly fine because of its functionality and widespread adoption in the market Google Analytics is seen by many marketers as the single source of truth for website traffic engagement and conversion data of course websites aren't the only way people access the Internet we also have to consider the importance of mobile consumers and mobile apps alongside websites it's possible to collect data from mobile apps using Google Analytics SDK or software development kit you'll need to implement and configure additional code to view mobile app data in the Google Analytics interface if you are tracking apps you should note this requirement with your app development team it's not a task marketers generally do themselves but it should be part of the brief to the app development team