What is Google Analytics

History of Google Analytics

Google Analytics was launched in November 2005, after Google acquired Urchin, a web analytics company, in March 2005. Google integrated Urchin’s technology with its own advertising and search services and offered it for free to webmasters and marketers.

Google Analytics has evolved over the years, adding new features and capabilities, such as real-time analytics, e-commerce reporting, custom visitor segmentation, and mobile app analytics. It has also undergone several changes in its interface and data collection methods. The latest version of Google Analytics is called Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which was launched in October 2020. GA4 is the successor of Universal Analytics (UA), which was the previous version of Google Analytics since 2013. GA4 uses a new measurement model that is based on events and parameters, rather than sessions and hits. GA4 also integrates more closely with Google’s BigQuery, a cloud-based data warehouse service.

Availability

It is free to use for most users, except the corporate ones that want to access advanced features. The paid version of google Analytics is called Google Analytics 360.

Google Analytics in its newest iteration – 4 – is an event-based analytics platform which connects web and mobile domains. Users that were utilizing the previous version – called Universal Analytics – need to migrate to the fourth version.

Google Analytics is a great option for businesses that want to understand how customers interact with their pages and/or mobile apps.

It is a true powerhouse of web analytics software that offers plenty of options and – when used in conjunction with Google Tag Manager – offers almost unparalleled customization options, allowing users to track such small details as different page scroll levels or distinguishing between different links that were used to reach a specific subpage.

Google Analytics is a great fit for business owners and marketers that want to explore in detail what visitors are doing on the page. They can measure custom dimensions, specify various conversion events or track users across different devices.

Google Analytics works either by placing its tracking code inside every web page’s code or by employing Google Tag Manager, or any other tag manager.

Pros and cons

The most important distinction between Google Analytics 4 and other, more performance-oriented tracking platforms such as Voluum is that Google Analytics first and foremost analyses traffic data – it cannot alter traffic in any way. Nor is it able to present live data – the data displayed in reports in Google Analytics 4 is delayed, which doesn’t matter that much in non-performance-oriented campaigns.

What’s also important to understand is that Google Analytics 4 cannot by configured to be fully GDPR compliant, as it cannot guarantee if the server which stores data of EU-citizens will be located withing EU jurisdiction.

Lastly, Google Analytics may be off-putting for beginner users. Its plethora of customization options require some forethought when setting up analytics and although the platform allows to use natural language when pulling a specific report, it may still overwhelm beginners with mountains of data.

Google Analytics 4 is about optimizing website experience toward enticing users to take desired actions. It is not however designer for massive A/B testing efforts, where you switch variants of a website in reaction to live data to find the most performing one. There are good Google Analytics alternatives to consider, if Google Analytics 4 doesn’t feel like a good fit.