What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a cloud-based analytics tool that measures and reports website traffic. It is the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.

Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs. It gives actionable insights into how visitors find and use your site, and how to keep them

coming back. In a nutshell, Google Analytics provides information about:

• How your users interact with your website & how engaged they are – pages per session, average time spent on the website, bounce rate, how many people click on a specific link, watch a video, time spent on the webpage.
• Who visits your website – user`s geo location (i.e. city, state, country), the language they speak, the browser they are using.
• What users do once they are on your website – how long do users stay on the website, how many pages on average users view.
• When users visit your website – date & time of their visits.
• Whether visitors came to your website through a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), a link from another website, or a direct type-in.

What are the main Google Analytics features?

• Built-In reports, Dashboards and Real-time analytics

How to use Google Analytics?

• Create a Gmail account – to be able to use Google Analytics, you will need to have a Google account.

• You will receive an email from noreply-analytics@google.com with a subject line
• Sign in to Google Analytics (click on the green button on the top right corner)
• You will see the main Google Analytics panel. Choose the account and the view corresponding to your website
• This is what you will see & this is how you will know that you have access to Google Analytics

Google Analytics Interface

Dashboards

Dashboards are a collection of widgets that give you an overview of the reports and metrics you care

about most. Dashboards let you monitor many metrics at once, so you can quickly check the health of

your accounts or see correlations between different reports.

Audience Overview

This report gives you a quick overview of the overall performance of the website – number of sessions, users (both new and returning), page views, average session duration, bounce rate, new sessions.

When you launch Google Analytics, you see the overview of the Audience report

Location

The location report provides information about the geographic location of your users (i.e. Country).

To see the State and the City where your users come from, click on the interactive map.

Real-Time

The Real-Time Report allows you to monitor activity as it happens on your website – e.g. how many people are on your site right now, which pages or events they're interacting with, and which goal conversions have occurred.

I have already published a blog on the 
Google Webmaster Tools and its Verification methods.

SINU CR