Google Analytics 101

Google Analytics 101: Basics You Should Know

Beginners’ Question – What is Google Analytics? Google Analytics is a free tool by Google, that is used to generate, monitor and...

Written by Deepanshu Gahlaut · 1 min read >
google analytics 101

Beginners’ Question – What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool by Google, that is used to generate, monitor and analyze detailed statistics about your website’s traffic and traffic sources, sales, and conversion.

It gives you a detailed information about who is visiting your site, what they are looking for, how much they are spending on the site, and how they are getting to your site.

Is Google Analytics Free of Charge?

Yes, the basic Google analytics is free of charge; however, a premium version is available at a flat annual fee of $150,000 (which is recommended for websites with 1 billion hits per month) with the following advantages:

  • Access to your all website data.
  • Maximum safety and security for your data and fully control.
  • 24*7 expert support.
  • Up to 3 million rows of data in unsampled reports.
  • 4-hour fresh data.
  • Robust and comprehensive tools and lot more…..

Why Google Analytics?

A. Build and Strengthen Your Audience

  1. To build your audience for your business – Google analytics help you to analyze your website visitor traffic, their behavior and the exact path to your business goal.
  2. Discover the customer route to reach you – With the help of Traffic Sources and Visitor Flow, you can track the path users take to reach your website.
  3. Measure the visitor interaction and behavior – Google analytics helps you make a visual evaluation of how visitors interact with your pages, how much time they spend on the page, bounce rate and exit rate, what they’re looking for etc.

B. Convert Your Audience Into Goals

  1. Create and analyze your goals – Google Analytics provides better insights into which campaigns or channel (such as Social media, Direct, Referral or Organic search) drive better visits, sales and other actions from your users.                                                                                              Goals in GA
  2. Target the right audience – Google Analytics helps you to target the best channel, in turn, the right audience with the help of features like remarketing.

C. Take Instant Actions to Grow Your Business

  1. Test and Analyse – The excellent reporting in GA helps you turn your site visitors into real customers, by providing the better reports, insights regarding campaigns. Thus you can create different campaigns, run, analyze and repeat the successful ones.
  2. Work intelligently – GA actively monitors your site’s traffic to detect significant statistical variations and generates Intelligence events or alerts when they happen.

intelligence events in GA

Google Analytics Limitations

Google analytics is the most popular web analytics tool but have some limitations inherent with it such as reprocessing information and inaccurate and incomplete keyword data. For more information, read this post.

Top Alternatives to Google Analytics (10+ options)

There is a plenty of web analytics tool that offers website statistics, for example –

  1. Piwik
  2. Open Web Analytics
  3. eAnalytics
  4. Clicky
  5. KISSmetrics
  6. Woopra
  7. Mixpanel
  8. FoxMetrics
  9. Mint
  10. Gauges
  11. Chartbeat
  12. W3Counter
  13. Adobe analytics

What are your thoughts about Google Analytics? Have you any experience with other alternatives of GA? Please share in comments.

Written by Deepanshu Gahlaut
I write on SEO, content marketing, latest technologies, and social media. You can find me online, or at home watching sci-fi movies, listening songs, or sleeping. In addition, my latest obsession is creating, collecting and organizing visual content on my new blog - Infopixi, to help bloggers, marketers, and businesses. Profile