Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that will give detailed statistics about visitors to a website. Google Analytics has the ability to track visitors from all referrers, such as search engines, display advertising, pay-per click, email and links with in documents such as PDF. Google Analytics uses a dashboard type data view to display high level data for the casual user or as I like to call them “Management”. But Google Analytics also provides more in-depth data report. With the use of Google Analytics pages that are performing poorly can be identified and as well as pages that are the “Most hit”. Google Analytics can also tell where your visitors are coming from, and how long they are staying on the site. Google Analytics can also track and return results for mobile websites, mobile apps and web enabled mobile phones. This includes high-end phones such as iPhone or Android to non-JavaScript enabled devices.
Google Analytics can also be used for ecommerce reporting. Google Analytics can track sales goals and transactions, if integrated with AdWords you can track data on keywords, search queries and much more. If integrated with AdSense, you can get reports on site content that is generating the most revenue.
Google Analytics offers customized reporting. Some of the reporting features include advanced analysis tools. These tools can produce advance analysis with the use of pivot tables, multi dimensions and filtering. Custom reporting will allow you to create, save and edit custom reports that let you show the data that you need to show. What is good about the custom reporting is that once a report is created it will available to you as long you want. So you will not need to recreate it every time you need that report. Exporting data to Excel, CSV and PDF is also a feature of Google Analytics as well as the API and developer platform. This will allow the programmers to create integrations and develop client applications.
Google Analytics seems to be a very robust application for one that is free. Google Analytics is very comparable to other analytic programs such as WebTrends. In doing this assignment I am now going to look into integrating Google Analytics into some of the website development that I do outside of work.