What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. This service is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is available free of charge to anyone with a Google account.

Google Analytics is used to track website performance and gather visitor insights. This can help organizations determine the top sources of user traffic, measure the success of their marketing activities and campaigns, track goal completion (such as purchases, adding products to cart), find patterns and trends in user engagement, and glean other visitor information such as demographics.

How does Google Analytics work?

Each time a user visits a web page, the tracking code collects pseudonymous information about how the user interacted with the page. For the Google Store, the metering code can show how many users visited pages selling drinkware versus pages selling homeware.

Google Analytics includes features that can help users identify trends and patterns in how visitors engage with their websites. Features enable data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting and integration with other applications. These features include:

• Data visualization and monitoring tools, including dashboards, scorecards and motion charts that display changes in data over time;
• Data filtering, manipulation and funnel analysis;
• Data collection application program interfaces (APIs);
• Predictive analytics, intelligence and anomaly detection;
• Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions;
• Custom reports for advertising, acquisition, audience behavior and conversion;
• Email-based sharing and communication; 
• Integration with other products, including Google Ads, Google Data Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google AdSense, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Display & Video 360, Google Ad Manager and Google Search Console.

How to Add Google Analytics to Your Blog

You have a blog. You spend hours writing great content on your blog. So why not take a few minutes to set up Google Analytics to monitor your stats?

It's a no brainer - If you commit a few minutes now to set up your Google Analytics to track, then you'll be able to let the data you get help inform your strategies, topics, and promotion.

In the video below are step by step instructions for adding Google Analytics to your blog on Blogger

Important metrics in Google Analytics

A metric is a standard of quantitative measurement. Google Analytics enables users to track up to 200 different metrics to measure how their websites are performing. While some metrics may be more valuable to certain businesses than others, these are some of the most popular metrics:

• Users. A user is a unique or new visitor to the website.
• Bounce rate. The percentage of visitors who viewed only a single page. These visitors only triggered a single request to the Google Analytics server.
• Sessions. The group of visitor interactions that happen in a 30-minute window of activity.
• Average session duration. How long on average each visitor stays on the site.
• Percentage of new sessions. The percentage of website visits that are first-time visits.
• Pages per session. The average number of page views per each session.
• Goal completions. The number of times visitors complete a specified, desirable action. This is also known as a conversion.
• Page views. Total number of pages viewed.