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Google Analytics Reporting

By Heshy Friedman

Google Analytics is a website analytics tool that gives detailed information about a website’s traffic. It was launched by Google in 2005, and is by far the most popular and important website tracking tool. The standard version, which suffices for most websites, is free. Google also offers a more advanced premium version called Google Analytics 360.

The tracking tools provided by Google Analytics are very helpful to website owners. These include stats such as general website visits, individual pageviews, location of visitors, traffic sources, and time spent on the site and individual pages. This information can be invaluable to owners to study traffic patterns as well as see the effectiveness of certain marketing campaigns.

Google provides this service for free because they use it for their own research data. With access to traffic statistics and usage patterns on the vast majority of websites, Google has a repository of data, which they utilize for their research and development purposes. Analytics therefore benefits both the end user as well as Google that supplies this free service.

Google Analytics can only be configured with a Google Account, such as Gmail or G Suite. This ensures that Google has background information and control of each account. Once an account is created, Google provides a code snippet to add to the website. Once this code snippet is added to a defined website, Analytics will be able to start tracking the website statistics.

Whenever I launch a new website, I install Google Analytics on the website. This allows website owners to have this information actively collecting from the time of launch in case they need to analyze it in the future. Because it’s a free tool, there is no loss installing it and it can only provide helpful information in the future. Therefore, I always request the Google login from customers upon launching the site so that I can set up the account and add the snippet of code for them. I generally will request a customer use their own Google account so they have full access to their own statistics from within their own account.