What Is

What Does Google Analytics Track?

If you’ve looked into data tracking for your website, you’ve likely heard of Google Analytics. But what does Google Analytics track?

This free website analysis service from Google offers insight into how users find and use your website. By using Google Analytics correctly, you can transform your online marketing campaign. Keep reading to learn more about this service and how it can help your business. 

How does Google Analytics track data?

Google Analytics tracks data through a unique JavaScript code installed on all your website pages. Each time a user visits your site, the code will track information through cookies. Once Google Analytics collects enough data, it will generate a report.

What can you track with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can track up to 200 metrics to measure a website’s performance. Some of the many data points you can monitor through Google Analytics include:

• How many users are currently on your site: These real-time reports are an essential feature that allows you to see data such as traffic changes for a one-day campaign and the effectiveness of sharing a post on social media.
• Location of users: Google Analytics can show the country, city, or continent from which your visitors are viewing your website.
• What devices your audience members use: Track how your site is performing across various devices, as well as their brand and operating system. 
• Which channels drive the most traffic: In your website analysis report, you can see which social sites are driving the most traffic or if your site has better rankings in organic search. 
• Effectiveness of marketing campaigns: Google Analytics measures site traffic, which you can use to determine the effectiveness of a recent marketing campaign.
• How users navigate your site: Tracking each user’s journey through your site will help you understand your visitors’ behavior overall.
• Which pages are popular: Google Analytics allows you to view which pages are popular and which pages could use some attention to generate higher rankings.
• How fast your website loads: Page loading time is one of the main factors Google will consider when indexing your pages, and by tracking this metric, you will have a greater chance of improving your page rankings.
• Top-selling products: Using Google Analytics, you can track your top-selling products and who buys them, as well as information such as the ecommerce conversion rate and the time to purchase.
• All clicks on your site: Learn which clickable areas are doing better than others by tracking ad clicks, outbound clicks, and other site navigation links.
• Which users are important to your business: Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your data for new visitors, referral traffic, organic traffic, and more.

What can you not track with Google Analytics?

While Google Analytics offers many benefits, there are also some limitations. Some of the metrics you can’t track with this tool include:

• Individual users: Google prohibits companies from storing users’ personal information, such as a username or IP address. However, you can keep a unique ID for that individual user. 
• Historical data: Google Analytics will only process information from when you began using site tracking. For example, if you start using this service in August 2022, it will only process data from the day you begin tracking.
• What the user did on other networks: With Google Analytics, you can only track what actions a user performs on your site. If they found your site through Facebook or other social media, Google Analytics will not record these actions.
• Visits to competitor websites: As soon as a user lands on your site, Google Analytics will begin tracking their behavior, the pages they visit, and other actions they perform on your site. If a user abandons your site for a competitor, the tool will not track where they go. 
• If the user deleted their cookies: Google Analytics uses cookies to track which customers are new and which are returning. However, once a user deletes their cookies, it will consider them a new user the next time they visit your site. If a user disables JavaScript and continues browsing your site, Google Analytics cannot track their actions.

How can Google Analytics help my marketing campaign?

Google Analytics helps you make decisions on your marketing campaign based on data. If you want to spend more on advertising, this tool can help you discover where you should be advertising and what types of content you need to be sharing. Through Google Analytics, you can categorize information into the following sections:

Acquisition

Acquisition refers to how users arrive at your site. An acquisitions report is a great way to see which avenues are best for bringing traffic to your site and getting specific actions to occur. For example, you can use this data to explore referral sources or know which search engine drives the most traffic.

Behavior

A behavior report shows what actions visitors are taking on your website. By using these reports, you can correctly assess the performance of the content on your site and determine if your visitors are taking the actions you want them to take. 

Conversions

The conversions report from Google Analytics helps your company understand the conversion process for your visitors, which can assist in improving your conversion rate. This report contains four sections: 

• Goals
• Ecommerce
• Multichannel funnel
• Attribution

Ultimately, Google Analytics is an effective problem-solving tool that can help your company identify potential issues on your website and work toward creating a solution.

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