Google analytics is a part of Google Marketing Platform brand that tracks and reports website traffic. Google analytics provides a software development kit that includes various software development tools. This kit is usually installed to use the compiler, debugger and the software framework for building applications with advanced functionalities such as advertisements and push notifications.
Google analytics software development kit allows the gathering of usage data from iOS and Android apps also. Browsers, browser extensions, firewalls and other means can be used to block Google Analytics.
The following are some of the important features of Google Analytics:
Used to track website activity such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate, etc
Can show information about individual activities on the website, source of the traffic etc.
Users can create Google Ads to review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions.
Shows information like high-level, dashboard-type of data for a casual user
Poorly performing pages can be identified with techniques such as funnel visualization, source of visitors to the website, geographical location of the visitors, duration of their visit, etc.
Provides features such as custom visitor segmentation.
E-commerce tools of Google analytics can track sales activity and performance.
Provides Real Time analysis that gives the website owner about the number of visitors currently using the website.
Provides Real Time analysis that gives the website owner about the number of visitors currently using the website.
How does Google Analytics work?
A snippet of JayaScript code that the website owner adds to every page of his website is called Tracking Code. This Tracking Code runs in the browser of the visitor and collects visitor data and sends it to Google data collection server.
A larger JavaScript file is loaded by the Tracking Code from the Google web server to set variables with the user’s account number. This larger file is called ga.js.
This ga.js is downloading only once if caching is enabled in the user’s browser. All websites implementing Google Analytics with the ga.js code use the same master file from Google.
Tracking Code also sets a first party cookie on each of the visitor’s computer, which stores information such as previous visits of the user, timestamp of current visit and campaigns that directed the visitor to the landing page.
This kind of information obtained from the user’s browser has also raised some privacy concerns. Google has taken care of these concerns in the following ways.
Google analytics can anonymize the IP address.
Google has released a browser plug-in that can turn off the data about a page visit to be sent to Google.
Google scripts that track user behaviour has produced multiple browser plug-ins to reject tracking cookies. With these plug-ins, users can block Google Analytics and other sites which track their activities.
Google Analytics API is very useful in building custom applications such as reporting tools. Google Analytics is the most widely used website statistics service currently. The popularity of Google and the ease of use of the tools have made it very successful.
