Google Analytics: How does the most popular tool in the Internet space work?

Everyone who has ever wanted or still wants to create their own website has heard about Google Analytics. Planning to develop an online store, or launching a news portal, you will definitely hear about Google Analytics, but what is it?

Google Analytics is one of the most important tools for owners of Internet resources. It is analytics from Google that allows you to track the performance of your store and the success of marketing campaigns. Google Analytics can help you find errors that are present on the site, or analyze the data by changing the vector of development. This tool is extremely important for any Internet resource, but despite this, not many people know about the principles of its operation.

In this article we will tell you how Google Analytics can help you create an online store of your dreams and how with the help of Google analytics you can make your business even more promising, we will also answer in detail the most popular questions related to Google Analytics and of course share our experience. Read this article to the end, because in it we will highlight all the points related to the preparation of the online store for competition in the niche, the details of the development and the moments that are worth paying special attention to.

What is the Google Analytics tool for?

The first question that we will not include in the general list, because it is fundamental is “Why Google analytics is needed". The answer to this question lies in the very name of the tool, in this case it is analytics. Google has provided its users with a free opportunity to receive data on the success of their sites, track attendance and regulate certain processes related to the online store. When planning to launch an online store or ordering the creation of a turnkey online store, you will somehow have to get to know Google Analytics better, because this tool will help you find answers to all questions related to your Internet resource.

The main task of Google Analytics is to collect data from all pages of your site and segment them. The tool itself collects traffic and conversion data in order to show you the available figures on various charts in the future. With the help of these charts, you can make important decisions that can fundamentally change your business and make it more productive or, on the contrary, unprofitable. But how to influence Google Analytics indicators?

In order to initially get a good start, you need to think about who will develop an online store. It is impossible to cope with the creation of a high-quality online store alone, because for development you will need knowledge from many fields. By contacting specialists, you will be able to order a turnkey online store and at the same time not worry about the development process. The team of the Gloss web studio has been creating turnkey online stores and corporate websites for 13 years. During this time, we have managed to create more than a thousand online stores and websites for our customers. Among our regular customers are the leading companies of Ukraine. At the same time, Gloss web studio is a leader in the creation of online stores and other web resources in Ukraine. By contacting us, you are guaranteed to get a high-quality turnkey online store, but let's go back to Google Analytics.

How does Google Analytics work? What is the principle of its operation based on? How reliable is the data provided by Google Analytics? The answers to all these questions are waiting for you in the next block.

How Google Analytics works and what is needed to use it

The development of an online store is a long segmented process that requires certain knowledge and experience. After the development is completed, it's time for optimization and finally for the promotion itself. But how to evaluate the quality of an online store? How to track the success of marketing campaigns and how to assess what is happening with your site? That's what Google Analytics is for.

As we mentioned earlier, Google Analytics collects data, but how can it see what even the site owner himself does not see? The answer is extremely simple, Google Analytics works with the site code. In order to answer the most frequent questions related to Google Analytics, we decided to create a separate article, the information of which will be interesting for many. As for the most popular questions and answers to them, their list is as follows:

1. How Google Analytics works and how it manages to collect data

The first thing users usually ask is how Google Analytics works and how it collects data. As we mentioned earlier, everything is very simple - Google Analytics is a specific code that is embedded in your site. Due to the fact that the Google Analytics code is located in the code of your site, it opens access to all the data that your site exchanges with the search engine, which allows you to not only see the schedule of visits in the future, but even specific numbers of users who have visited your site. At the same time, Google Analytics is able to read user actions and classify them as a conversion indicator. Conversion in the case of an online store is any action that is considered useful, for example, placing an order or subscribing to a free newsletter is a conversion. The conversion is calculated using the ratio of the number of useful actions performed with the total number of visitors for a certain period of time, which later results in quite exhaustive indicators.

Focusing on the data received from Google Analytics, a specialist can not only conclude how successfully marketing campaigns work– but also create a new promotion strategy. Such access to data allows any online store to become successful, but misuse of available information can ruin your business.

2. How does Google Analytics count the number of users

As we mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is a kind of code that is embedded in the code of your online store. In the process of developing an online store, specialists create a website code in which you can embed the Google Analytics code in advance. With this piece of code, Google Analytics is able to read the data sent by the search engine, which means the probability of error is minimal. At the same time, there are 2 types of users in Google Analytics at once, namely:

Users are just people who have visited your online store. This indicator does not take into account whether this user was previously on your site or not, this is the total number of visitors to your online store for the amount of time you selected.

New users - contrary to the name, this indicator is not able to accurately count the number of new users on your site. The thing is that Google Analytics works with cookies that are stored on the user's device. If a user uses the Internet from only one device and does not clear cookies, Google Analytics will not decide that this is a new user. At the same time, if a potential buyer has never been to your site, Google Analytics will track him and mark him in the statistics.

Also, the statistics of ”new users" include those who use different devices to visit your site, and those who periodically clean cookies. Clearing cookies makes it impossible to read the user's attendance card, and therefore Google Analytics may make a mistake in this indicator.

3. How Google Analytics learns the user's gender

If you have ordered the creation of a turnkey online store and plan to sell women's clothing, then you will definitely need this function. In Google Analytics, you can not only find out if a user was on your site and how many users visited your site in total, but even what gender they were. To do this, Google Analytics has several ways at once, but we will focus on the most effective ones, namely, the Android advertising identifier and the IDFA advertising identifier for iOS.

Both identifiers work on the same principle, namely, they read user data using a smartphone and applications. Very often in mobile games you need to specify your gender and age, so this data quite legally gets into the search engine site first, and then, subject to the start of tracking this information– into your Google analytics. Thus, if your potential client visits games or applications and his gender and age are specified– your Google analytics will know this data as soon as the user visits this or that application. This opens up limitless opportunities for marketing, because having such knowledge with the help of the free Google Analytics tool, you can bypass all your competitors and become a niche leader, you only need to use the available data and capabilities correctly.

4. How does Google Analytics determine where traffic came from

Despite the fact that there are not so many variations on the Google Analytics page where traffic could come from, Google Analytics is still able to distinguish between different traffic sources on your online store's website. To do this, Google Analytics uses HTTP_REFERER. This referrer tells you where the traffic is coming from. It contains the email address of the source, which Google Analytics is able to attribute to a particular type of traffic source. For example, if a user went to your online store page from Instagram, then this information will be in the email address, and Google Analytics will recognize it and attribute the resulting transition to social sources.

By tracking the number of clicks from different sources, you can build a marketing strategy. Analyzing the indicators of transitions, specialists are able to predict which source needs to invest more funds to increase the available result. However, do not forget about the other sources, even if they are not too effective. In this case, each source can be effective, the main thing is to create a suitable marketing campaign that fully meets the needs and expectations of your potential customers.

5. How Google Analytics calculates the bounce rate

In this case, in order to accurately calculate the indicators, Google has adopted a strict calculation algorithm, where a failure is considered a session during which the user visited only one page of your site and then left.
In order for the refusal to turn into a session, the user needs to perform any action on the page of your site, while leaving the page he originally got to. The bounce rate does not affect the ranking of the site at the moment, but at the same time this indicator can tell you about errors on the pages of the site. In order to understand which pages have errors, it is only necessary to track the dynamics of changes in the bounce rate and find the page that is left most often. After auditing a page or the entire site, you will be able to see the full picture and correct errors that encourage users to leave your site.

6. How Google Analytics tracks events

In order to understand how Google Analytics works, it is necessary to understand what an event is in the understanding of this tool. For Google Analytics, an event is any action that you track. By launching your online store and using Google Analytics, you can set certain goals and track indicators. For example, you can track the number of completed forms or the number of bookmarks of certain products. This data can help your specialist collect a complete picture of user interaction with the site and mark the most popular functions or actions. If you track bookmarks in your personal account– then with the help of such data, you will be able to understand which products are of the greatest interest from potential buyers. In order to configure the event indicator, you need to specify the event category, the type of interaction and specify which group the event belongs to. Having figured out how to set up Google Analytics events or by contacting specialists, you will be able to expand your statistics, which can positively affect the quality of your marketing campaigns.

So the list of the most popular questions related to the principle of Google Analytics has come to an end. Looking at this list, it becomes clear why Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for web analytics, but it is far from the only one. Each SEO specialist has his own set of tools for tracking indicators, which is why it is important to find a good specialist in this niche.

Despite the importance of analytics, you will not be able to achieve results with a broken site, and therefore, before you start tracking data using Google analytics, it is important to make sure that your site is ready to accept users. Turning to novice web studios, you are at great risk, because savings during the development of an online store can result in huge waste at the stage of website optimization and promotion. To avoid such a situation, you can order the creation of a turnkey online store from professionals, which will allow you to reduce the risk of errors on the site to zero.

In order to order the creation of a turnkey online store from the specialists of the Gloss web studio, you only need to use the information in the "contacts" tab. There you will find all the necessary information to contact our representatives. If you have any questions related to the services of the Gloss web studio– you can always get an exhaustive answer to them using an online chat posted on all pages of our site.

Start your business with the best – order the creation of an online store from the specialists of the Gloss web studio and start conquering the search results - tomorrow!