Complete guide to Google Analytics for traffic analysis

It is the most popular among the traffic analysis tools, with a market share in the segment of 86.0 percent, which equates to a presence on 56.4 percent of all websites. Since 2005, Google Analytics has been virtually everyone’s go-to Google tool for helping website and application owners monitor and analyze the behavior of users interacting with their online content, to measure performance, better understand audiences, identify problems and opportunities, and optimize marketing and content strategies. So let’s take an overview of this tool, examining what features Google Analytics provides, the type of analysis it performs, and its relevance in the online landscape.

What is Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free, cloud-based web traffic analysis tool developed by Google that enables website owners, digital marketers, and analysts to monitor, measure, and analyze the performance of their websites and online marketing campaigns.

More specifically, this tool provides a wide range of metrics, reports, and features that help understand user behavior, traffic trends, acquisition sources, content interactions, target conversion, and many other aspects important for improving website and marketing strategies, and over the years it has taken a central role in managing and optimizing the online presence of businesses, e-commerce, brands, and professionals.

Currently, Google offers a free version of Analytics, which offers a wide range of features and is an appropriate solution for most small and medium-sized businesses despite a number of limitations and constraints, while the paid version, which is called Google Analytics 360, is usually recommended for large companies or those with advanced needs and a high amount of traffic, as it provides additional features, higher “hit” limits, and dedicated support.

Key features

Powerful and versatile, Analytics allows users to collect, analyze and interpret data on website performance and user behavior, providing valuable insights to improve SEO, digital marketing and user experience strategies.

Indeed, within this platform we find a wide range of monitoring, survey and reporting features to track different aspects of user behavior on a website or app. More specifically, Analytics performs various types of analysis to understand trends, behavioral patterns and performance, and among the most useful and interesting ones we can include:

• Traffic. Information about the origin of traffic to the site, through data on referral sources, organic and paid search, social media, and marketing campaigns. In this way we can understand, for example, which channels are most effective in bringing visitors to the site.
• Audience. Analysis of demographic, geographic, and behavioral characteristics of the audience, offering data such as age, gender, language, geographic location, new and old visitors, and audience interests. In this way we can divide users into specific segments according to their characteristics and preferences, facilitating the optimization of targeted marketing and content strategies.
• Behavior. Analysis of user behavior on the website or app, providing metrics on content visited, session duration, bounce rate, page speed, and preferred navigation paths. Studying these elements, and in particular page speed metrics and other performance indicators, provides us with a key to understanding and optimizing website performance and improving the user experience.
• Conversions. Allows us to set and monitor conversion goals (specific actions taken by users, such as purchasing a product or signing up for a newsletter) and measure conversion perf