# What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that provides insights into website traffic and user behavior. With Google Analytics, you can track website performance, monitor user engagement, and gain valuable insights into your audience and marketing campaigns. The tool is designed for businesses and organisations of all sizes and provides a wealth of data to help you make informed decisions about your online presence.

By tracking website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your audience and make data-driven decisions to improve your website and online marketing efforts.

# Useful Metrics

Google Analytics provides a vast amount of data and metrics that can be used to gain insights into website performance and user behavior. Here are some of the most useful metrics and insights that can be obtained from Google Analytics:

Audience Overview: This section provides a high-level view of your website's audience, including data on the number of visitors, their geographic location, and the devices they use to access your site.

Acquisition: This section provides insights into where your website traffic is coming from, including data on referral traffic, search engine traffic, and social media traffic.

Behavior: This section provides data on how users interact with your website, including metrics on pageviews, time on site, and bounce rate.

Conversion: This section provides data on the actions that users take on your website, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or signing up for a newsletter.

E-commerce: If you have an online store, this section provides data on sales, revenue, and the products that are being purchased.

Real-Time: This section provides real-time data on website traffic, including the number of users on your site and the pages they are viewing.

Custom Reports: Google Analytics allows you to create custom reports that can provide tailored insights into your website data.

It's possible to build reports on Google Analytics data in Google Data Studio (Looker Studio) or export it to Google Bigquery.

# How does it work?

Google Analytics works by collecting data from a website using JavaScript tracking code. This tracking code is added to the HTML of your website's pages and is used to track user interactions, such as pageviews, clicks, and other events. When a user interacts with your website, the tracking code sends data to the Google Analytics servers, where it is processed and stored. This data can then be accessed and analyzed through the Google Analytics interface.

The Google Analytics tracking code uses cookies to store information about a user's session on your website, including the number of pageviews, the length of the session, and other information. This information is used to create a unique user profile, which can be used to gain insights into user behavior and track user interactions across multiple visits to your site.

Google Analytics also uses various algorithms and statistical models to process the data it collects, including machine learning and data analysis techniques. This allows the tool to provide valuable insights and trends in website performance, such as identifying the most popular pages, tracking user engagement and conversion rates, and much more.

In addition to the tracking code, Google Analytics also provides APIs that allow you to access and process the data programmatically. This can be useful for automating data analysis and integrating Google Analytics data with other tools and systems.