The Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

Whether you’re reporting to your boss, a client, or just working for yourself, understanding how your website or app is performing and reporting on those is an important part of showing the value of your work. So, how do you do it?

The first thing you need to do is set your goals. What are you working toward? Oftentimes, you’ll be tasked with increasing site traffic or increasing site conversions. To do this, you’ll need a tool that tracks those numbers, and that’s where Google Analytics comes in.

In this introduction chapter we will cover what Google Analytics is, how it works, how to get started, and what information it provides. You can also learn how to set up GA4, how to find the data that matters to you and your business, and dive deeper into how to navigate the GA4 interface.

So, buckle up! We’re kicking things off right now!

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free website tracking tool and platform that collects data on how users interact with your website. Once the data is collected, Google Analytics sorts the data into reports that can be segmented by users, sessions, and events.

A brief history of Google Analytics

Website data wasn’t always easy to access and comprehend. Originally, if people wanted to know what kind of traffic their site got, they’d have to read their server log. The server log would spit out a list of information for each action that happened on the site. While the information proved valuable, it was hard to interpret.

To make things a bit easier, companies started to compile log files and create reports based on the available information. A company called Urchin made reports of the log files and grew in popularity very quickly and turned a lot of heads. So much so that in 2005, Google acquired Urchin and started the process of building and branding Google Analytics. In fact, as Daniel Wells reflected in a comment on Linkedin, a Google tag used to be called an 'Urchin' derived from the original company pre-acquition.

Google Analytics, the original platform, was a simple visualization tool created to make log file data easier to read. A vaguely similar layout and familiar metrics are evident in the original platform.

This new version of Google Analytics was unveiled in 2007 and gave us our first look at the Custom Dashboard.

Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics became the standard in 2014 when it came out of beta. Universal Analytics became a must as the diversity in user devices expanded. The rise of mobile devices and tablets led to a larger need for tracking users across the internet and across devices.

Universal Analytics has evolved significantly in the ten years that it dominated the website analytics space. UA was retired on 1 July 2023, spurred on by an ageing legacy platform impeding data architecture scalability and the necessity to comply with data privacy requirements.

Google Analytics 4

The newest revision of the Google Analytics platform was released in October of 2020. Google Analytics 4 is a new take on App + Web properties and flows all data into one stream. GA4 also relies far more heavily on machine learning and aims to help analysts forecast with predictive analytics.

If you're starting fresh with Google Analytics, this is the version you will be using. If you're logging into Google Analytics after a long hiatus you'll discover that your profile has been auto migrated to GA4. If this is the case you'll want to review our GA4 setup guide to make sure your profile is working for your requirements.

To get any data from your website into Google Analytics, you must first place the tag on your site. As soon as that tag is properly placed Google Analytics will start collecting data. The data is then put into reports made up of metrics and dimensions.

Learn more about setting up GA4 in Chapter 1 of this guide.

Metrics are what produce the numbers you’ll find in the platform. Anything that can be measured with a number is a metric. Think of the number of users, number of purchases, value of conversions, average time on site, etc.

A dimension is how metrics can be segmented. Think of the word “by”: Number of users BY source. Average time on site BY landing page. Number of conversions BY device type.

Perhaps the most enticing thing about Google Analytics is that it’s free. This makes the platform available to anyone with a website, which in turn creates a larger community of users to share information and guidance. There are plenty of resources available on how to use Google Analytics, making it accessible for users of all levels.

That’s another advantage: Google Analytics is helpful to analysts at any skill level. With Google Analytics, you can achieve more basic level analysis on your site performance, but there is also opportunity for advanced analysis. Not only do you get information on what marketing channels drive traffic to your site, but you can also see which sites users come from at different times of day, what landing page they arrived at, and how long the page took to load for them.

Also, who wouldn’t want information on their website from the largest search engine on the internet? As search engine marketers, much of the work we do is aimed at pleasing Google. Having a platform that can tell us some of the information Google is tracking on our site is extremely beneficial for strategic planning. Using the numbers in Google Analytics, you’ll be able to make changes to your site with data-driven strategy as opposed to relying solely on intuition.

Lastly, as marketers, we use a lot of Google tools: Search Console, Google Ads, Looker Studio, Google Tag Manager, Google Optimize and more. All of these tools integrate seamlessly with Google Analytics.

While this guide specifically covers the ins and outs of Google Analytics, it's certainly not your only option. However, generally speaking, if you look elsewhere you may need to be prepared to pay, which may not be a bad thing if privacy and compliance is your priority.

As Jess Joyce covers, in her article on the Moz Blog, "there are many alternatives — both free and paid — that take into account privacy, cookie-less tracking, GDPR compliance, core web vitals, and more."

GA4 may well be your incentive to explore alternatives, even if you run them as an alternate so you can compare features and usability. As with many analytics programs the data you feed it supports generating the insights to help guide your strategy.

Absolutely! Analytics programs, including SEO Analytics platforms, like Moz Pro, generate more informed insights when they have quality data. Your site traffic is a valuable source of information when combined with ranking URLs and provides key insights on your estimated traffic from search.

When you connect Google Analytics to Moz Pro you can view traffic data in two areas: Site Traffic and Rankings.

In the Rankings section traffic will be overlaid against your so you can compare them and determine, at a glance, how a shift in rankings affected your traffic.

To get start gathering insights:

1. sign up for the Moz Pro Free Trial
2. track your target keywords
3. connect you GA4 profile to Moz Pro

Now you can compare ranking positions with your site's organic search traffic.

Updated by Jo Cameron and Zach Edelstein on September 4, 2023.

Let's dive right in — first up let's get setup with GA4.