Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google launched its service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most used web analytics service on the Internet. Google Analytics is also offered in two additional versions: subscription-based Google Analytics 360 , previously Google Analytics Premium , targeted to enterprise users, and Google Analytics for Mobile Applications , the SDK that enables the collection of usage data from iOS and Android Apps.
Video Google Analytics
Features
Integrated with AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking the quality and conversion of landing pages (goals). Goals may include sales, lead generation, viewing specific pages, or downloading a specific file. The Google Analytics approach is to display high-level dashboard data types for normal users, and more deeper data into the report set. Google Analytics analytics can identify poorly performing pages with techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors come from (referrers), how long they are on the website and their geographic position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation. Google Analytics e-commerce reporting can track sales activity and performance. An ecommerce report shows site transactions, revenue, and many other trade related metrics.
On September 29, 2011, Google Analytics launched Real Time analytics, allowing users to have an insight into the visitors currently on the site. A user can have 100 site profiles. Each profile is generally associated with one website. This is limited to sites that have less than 5 million page views per month (approximately 2 page views per second) unless the site is linked to an AdWords campaign. Google Analytics includes Google Website Optimizer, renamed Google Analytics Content Experiments . The Google Analytics Cohort analytics feature helps understand the behavior of separate user group components from your user population. This is useful for marketers and analysts for the successful implementation of marketing strategies.
Maps Google Analytics
History
Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005. Google services developed from Urchin on Demand. The system also brings ideas from Adaptive Path, whose product, Measure Map, was acquired and used in the redesign of Google Analytics in 2006. Google continues to sell the independent WebAnalytics Urchin Software that can be installed through a value-added reseller network until termination on March 28, 2012. The Google-branded version was launched in November 2005 to anyone who wanted to sign up. However, due to very high service requests, the new registration was terminated only a week later. When capacity is added to the system, Google begins to use a lottery type invitation code model. Before August 2006, Google sent a collection of invite codes because server availability was allowed; since mid-August 2006 services have been fully available to all users - whether they use Google for advertising or not.
The latest version of the Google Analytics tracking code is known as the asynchronous tracking code, which Google claims is significantly more sensitive and accurate, and is able to track very short activities on the website. The previous version delayed page loading and so on, for performance reasons, it is generally placed just before the near body HTML tag & lt;/body & gt; . New code can be placed between head tag & head & gt;... & lt;/head & gt; HTML because, once triggered, this code runs in parallel with page loading. In April 2011 Google announced the availability of a new version of Google Analytics featuring multiple dashboards, more custom reporting options, and a new interface design. This version is then updated with some other features like real-time analysis and goal flowchart.
In October 2012, another new version of Google Analytics was announced, called 'Universal Analytics'. The main differences from the previous version are: cross platform tracking, flexible tracking code to collect data from any device, and the introduction of custom dimensions and custom metrics In October 2017 the latest version of Google Analytics was announced, called 'Global Site Tag'. The goal is to unify the tagging system to simplify implementation.
Technology
Google Analytics is implemented with "page tags", in this case, called the Google Analytics Tracking Code, which is a snippet of JavaScript code that website owners add to each page of the website. The tracking code runs in the client browser when the client searches the page (if JavaScript is enabled in the browser) and collects visitor data and sends it to Google's data collection server as part of a web beacon request.
The tracking code contains a larger JavaScript file from Google's web server and then assigns a variable to the user's account number. Larger files (currently known as ga.js) are usually 18 KB, but the date of the file when the size is unknown. However, the newer size is more than 40Kbytes by May 2018. The command "c: dir ga.js/s" from PC shows the following file sizes between 2009 ~ 2018 (2009/10/07 23,536 ga.js, 2014/05/27 40.155 ga.js, 2014/10/10 40,924 ga.js, 2015/09/13 41.100 ga.js, 2017/08/06 43.082 ga.js, 2018/04/08 46.275 ga.js).
Files usually do not have to be loaded, because the browser cache. Assuming the cache is enabled in the browser, it will download ga.js only once at the beginning of the visit. Additionally, since all websites that implement Google Analytics with the ga.js code use the same parent file from Google, browsers that have previously visited other websites running Google Analytics will already have cached files on their computers.
In addition to sending information to Google servers, the tracking code establishes first-party cookies (if cookies are enabled in browsers) on each visitor's computer. This cookie stores anonymous information called ClientId. Prior to the launch of Universal Analytics, there were some cookies that store information such as whether visitors had visited previous sites (new or returning visitors), current time stamps, and referrer sites or campaigns that point visitors to the page (for example, search engines, keywords, banners, or emails).
If a visitor arrives on a site by clicking on a link tagged UTM (Urchin Traffic Monitor) parameters such as:
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http://toWebsite.com?utm_source=fromWebsite&utm_medium=bannerAd&utm_campaign=fundraiser2012
then the tag value is passed to the database as well.
Limitations
In addition, Google Analytics for Mobile Packages enables Google Analytics to be applied to mobile websites. Mobile Packages contain server-side tracking codes that use PHP, JavaServer Pages, ASP.NET, or Perl for server side languages. However, many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Adblock Firefox, and NoScript) and mobile apps Decide Mobile phones can block the Google Analytics Tracking Code. This prevents some traffic and the user is tracked and leads to a hole in the data collected. Also, privacy networks such as Tor will mask the user's actual location and present inaccurate geographic data. Some users do not have browsers that support JavaScript or disable this feature. However, these limits are considered small - affecting only a small percentage of visits.
The greatest potential impact on data accuracy comes from users who remove or block Google Analytics cookies. Without a set cookie, Google Analytics can not collect data. Each individual web user may block or delete cookies that result in loss of data from those visits for Google Analytics users. Website owners may encourage users not to disable cookies, for example, by making visitors more comfortable using the site through posting a privacy policy. This limit affects most web analytics tools that use page tags (usually JavaScript programs) embedded in web pages to collect visitor data, store them in a cookie on a visitor's computer, and send them to a remote database by pretending to load a small "beacon" graph.
Another limitation of Google Analytics for large websites is the use of sampling in the making of many of its reports. To reduce the burden on their servers and provide a relatively quick response to users for their requests, Google Analytics limits reports to 500,000 sessions at random at the profile level for its calculations. Although the error margin is indicated for visit metrics, the error margin is not reserved for other metrics in Google Analytics reports. For small data segments, the margin of error can be very large.
Performance
There are several online discussions about the impact of Google Analytics on site performance. However, Google introduced the asynchronous JavaScript code in December 2009 to reduce the risk of slow page loads marked with the ga.js script.
Privacy
Because everywhere, Google Analytics raises some privacy issues. Whenever someone visits a website that uses Google Analytics, Google tracks the visit via a user's IP address to determine the approximate geographical location of the user. To comply with the requirements of German law, Google Analytics can anonymize IP addresses. There are concepts that allow Google Analytics Tracking even if visitors use AdBlocker to disable Google Analytics or JavaScript disabled in browser settings. Google also released a browser plugin that turned off data about page visits sent to Google. Because this plug-in is produced and distributed by Google itself, it has encountered a lot of discussion and criticism. In addition, the embodiment of Google scripts that tracks user behavior has spawned numerous multiple plug-ins, often open-source, to reject tracking cookies. This plugin offers users the option, whether to allow Google Analytics (for example) to track their activity. However, in part because of the new European privacy laws, most modern browsers allow users to decline tracking cookies, although Flash cookies can be a separate issue again.
It has been reported anecdotally that behind a proxy server and some firewalls, the error can occur changing the timestamp and registering invalid searches. Webmasters who seek to mitigate Google Analytics-specific privacy issues may use a number of alternatives after their backend is hosted on their own computers. Until termination, such product instances are the Urlin WebAnalytics Software from Google itself. On January 20, 2015, the Associated Press reported that HealthCare.gov provides access to personal data of registrants to private companies specializing in advertising. Google Analytics is mentioned in the article.
Support and training
Google offers free Google Analytics KI Lessons, Google Analytics certification test, free Help Center FAQ, and Google Groups forum for official Google Analytics product support. New product features announced in Google Analytics Blog. Company support is provided through a Google Analytics Certified Partner.
Third party support
The Google Analytics API is used by third parties to create custom apps such as reporting tools. Many such applications exist. One is built to run on iOS devices (Apple) and displayed in Apple's app store. There are several third-party products that also provide tracking based on Google Analytic. The Management API, the Core Reporting API, the MCF Reporting API, and the Real-Time Reporting API are subject to limitations and quotas.
Popularity
Google Analytics is the most used website statistics service, in 2012 used in about 55% of the 10,000 most popular websites. Other market share analyzes claim that Google Analytics is used on approximately 49.95% of the top 1,000,000 websites (such as ratings in 2010 by Alexa).
In August 2013, Google Analytics was used by 66.2% of the top 10,000 most popular websites booked by popularity, as reported by BuiltWith. And in May 2008, Pingdom released a survey that states that 161 of the top 500 (32%) sites globally by their Alexa rankings use Google Analytics.
See also
- List of web analytics software
- Google Search Console
References
External links
- Official website
- Official blog
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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