An Introduction to Google Analytics

c/- Google Conversion University

Google Analytics is a free, web analytics tool that is hosted by Google.

Google Analytics shows you how visitors actually find and use your site, so you'll be able to,

• make informed site design and content decisions
• improve your site to convert more visitors into customers
• track the performance of your keywords, banner ads, and other marketing campaigns.
• and track metrics such as revenue, average order value, and ecommerce conversion rates.

Google Analytics can help you answer important questions about your site and your marketing initiatives, such as

• How are visitors using my site?
• How can I make my marketing campaigns more effective and accountable?
• Is my content effective?
• Where are visitors abandoning their shopping carts and where do they go afterwards?
• How can I improve my site navigation and help my visitors get more out of the site?

Google Analytics has been designed to meet the needs of novice users as well as web analytics experts.

Some of the features include:

• Map Overlay which can help you understand how to best target campaigns by geographic region
• AdWords Integration which makes it easy to track AdWords campaigns and allows you to use Google Analytics from your AdWords interface
• Internal Site Search which allows you to track how people use the search box on your site
• Benchmarking so that you can see whether your site usage metrics underperform or outperform those of your industry vertical.
• Funnel Visualization so that you can optimize your checkout and conversion click-paths

Here’s how Google Analytics works.

1. When a visitor accesses a page on your site, a request is made to the web server to display the page.
2. The page is served and the Google Analytics Tracking Code JavaScript is executed.
3. The Google Analytics Tracking Code, which is a snippet of code that you place on each page of your site, calls the trackPageView() method.  
4. At this point, the Google Analytics first-party cookies are read and/or written.
5. The webpage then sends an invisible gif request containing all the data to the secure Google Analytics reporting server, where the data is captured and processed.

Data is processed regularly throughout the day and you can see the results in your reports.

NOTE
Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies, which are considered safe and non-intrusive by most internet users today.

Although many people block third-party cookies from being set by their web browsers, this won’t affect Google Analytics.

DATA CONFIDENTIALITY
All data collected by Google Analytics is anonymous, including where visitors comes from, how the visitors navigate through the site, and other actions they may perform.

No personally identifiable information is collected, and Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.