In this booming world of online activities, Google analytics is very useful to track the website activity of the users such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate along with the information on the source of the traffic.

Sales activity and performance can be track by Google Analytics e-commerce reporting which shows a site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics.

With the help of Google Analytics You can track
i.Number of visits per hour/day/month
ii.Real data (see who’s on your site – LIVE)
iii.Countries
iv.Referrals, resources
v.Demographics.

I.Google Analytics features

1.Data visualization tool which includes a scorecards, dashboard and motion charts, which display changes in data over time.
2.Custom reports.
3.Analysis of subsets with Segmentation, such as conversions.
4.Integration with other Google products, such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.
5.Email-based sharing and communication.

II.How Does Google Analytics Collect Data:

Google Analytics collects the data of your website visitors and their interactions on your website by using a small snippet of JavaScript tracking code. Once it’s setup, Google Analytics will drop a cookie in the user’s browser for your website which will help to track every interaction that user performs on your site. With each user interaction on your website, the tracking code sends information to Analytics about your users and their interactions on your website. The information sent by the tracking code is called a hit which is a URL string with parameters of useful information about your users

The URL string include information like:

i.The language of the user’s browser
ii.The name of the page they’re viewing
iii.User’s device and its screen resolution
iv.The Analytics ID

There are 4 most common types of hits:
i.Page view hit is the most common type of hit which is send to Analytics. When a user loads a webpage with the tracking code on your site, this hit triggers.
ii.Event hit is an action when a user interacts with a particular element on your website,this event hit triggers which tracks actions like particular URL, clicking a video play button,submitting a contact form, a product carousel.
iii.Transaction hit is also called an eCommerce hit which passes data about the the user’s eCommerce purchases such as products purchased, transaction IDs, and stock keeping units.
iv.Social hit is an event which collect the information about your social media likes, shares, or tweet data.

III.How Does Google Analytics Process Data:

Google Analytics categorizes the data into users and sessions. It creates a random, unique ID associated with the user’s browser cookie when a user lands on a page with tracking code. Analytics considers each unique ID as a new unique user. So, when a new ID is detected, Analytics takes it as a new user. It is considered as a returning user and set over with the hit when an existing ID is detected.

IV.How Does Google Analytics Generate Reports:

Google Analytics reports are made up of 2 components: dimensions and metrics.

i.Dimensions are attributes of your data.
The most common dimensions for Google Analytics are Country, City, browser, Operating System and language.
For example, Country is a dimension which signifies countries like the India, United Kingdom,United States etc.

ii.Metrics are quantitative measurements of your dimensions. For example, the metric ‘sessions’ is the total number of sessions.
Google Analytics will create dimensions, and calculate the metrics for each dimension once the configuration settings have been applied to your collected data, which will store each dimension in its own aggregate database table as we see in reports.