Google Analytics is an important tool that gives you the metrics to see who is visiting your site, which pages are visited and how visitors found your site. For a small web page understanding the basics is enough to get a rough idea of how many clicks you had on your site and where in the world from. But if you have a growing business or you want your business to grow, Google Analytics can really help you with making data-driven decisions.

To collect data, Gooogle Analytics add a small piece of tracking code to each pade on your website. This tracking code will collect anonymous information about a visitor’s interacts with the site, e.g. the URLs of the pages visited. With this information, Google Analytics can calculate which pages are most popular or determin if users reached the purchase confirmation page.

Google Analytics will also collect information like the language the browser is set to, the type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), the device and operationg system used and the users’ location, age and gender (with their consence). It can even collec the “traffic source” which brought users to the site in the first place, which I find most useful. This might be a search engine, an advertisement they clicked on, or an email marketing campaign.

Google Analytics uses a browser cookie (a smal bit of text stored in the browser) to generate a random ID to distinguish between new and returning visitors and tie all the activity of a visitor into a single visit. Each period of activity is called a “session”. A session ends by default after 30 minutes of inactivity or when a user closes a browser window. Finally, all of this information is sent to Google Analytics to populate your reports.