What is Google analytics?
Google Analytics is a website analysis tool provided by Google Inc. It is one of the best free tools on the web for collecting website statistics and data, and it enables a wide range of important and in-depth website metrics and analytics that track every aspect of your site's performance. It is undoubtedly the best tool in the arsenal of every website owner.
Most of the website owners who use Google Analytics are content with using only a small part of its features and functions, most of them only use it to know the number of visitors to their site. This is undoubtedly an important statistic, but there are many important stats and reports provided by Google Analytics, which if you know how to use and follow them, can gain deep insight into your site and your visitors.
There are two versions of Google Analytics; the free version, the paid version known as Google Analytics 360.
In this guide we will focus on the free Google Analytics version, it is sufficient and provides all the necessary features to measure the performance of your site.
The importance and uses of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an essential tool for measuring site performance over time, understanding visitor behaviors, tracking the results and effectiveness of your advertising campaigns, SEO campaigns, link building, and all your other marketing efforts. The Google reports provided by google analytics allow site owners to track all site visitor statistics and performance metrics.
It also enables you to see the most visited pages, articles or products, and how your visitors interact with the page elements. It also gives you a lot of technical information, such as what devices visitors to the site use, what kind of browsers and operating systems they use.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of valuable data and information about your visitors, not only from the technical side, but also gives you important information about the demographic segments of your visitors, such as gender, age group, and geographical areas in which they live.
You can use Google statistics to direct your efforts and marketing campaigns and identify target segments, as it shows you an integrated file on the privacy of visitors, and the sources of traffic coming to your site, and this allows you to follow your marketing campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness first.
For example, if you are leading a Facebook marketing campaign, you can use the Google Analytics tool to measure the effectiveness of your campaign, because it allows you to track the number of visits coming from Facebook over time, and this will make it easier for you to evaluate your marketing campaign and measure the return on investment.
Google Analytics is a necessary tool for evaluating search engine optimization campaigns, unlike the Google Search Console tool, which is mainly used for selecting keywords and building SEO campaigns, Google Analytics is a complementary tool that enables you to measure the performance of these campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness by knowing changes in the number of visits to your site as a whole , or to a specific page, article, or corner of the site, such as a blog, store, donation page, etc.
Google Analytics is the light on your site, letting you know what's happening on it, and what visitors are doing while they're browsing. Since Google Analytics is owned by Google, you can easily integrate it with other Google tools, such as Google Search Console and Google Ads.
What does Google Analytics measure?
Google measures a lot of metrics related to your site, most website owners, as we said above, only use one or two of them, but there are many others. Learning and following Google Analytics will help you learn every little thing about your site.
The data that Google Analytics measures is divided into two categories:
Dimension data: The items you want to measure, such as the country or city where your traffic is coming from, the city you're running an ad campaign in, the social network you want to measure, or the Page or article you want to track and rate.
Measurement data: represents dimensional metrics. For example, if you launch a campaign aimed at increasing visits to the site from Saudi Arabia, the number of visits coming from there (for example, 1,000 visits per month) is included in the category of measurement data.