Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. The product is aimed at marketers as opposed to webmasters and technologists from which the industry of web analytics originally grew. It is the most widely used website statistics service.
GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also displays advertising, pay-per-click networks, e-mail marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.
Features
Integrated with AdWords, users can now review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include sales, lead generation, viewing a specific page, or downloading a particular file.
Google Analytics approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. GA analysis can identify poorly performing page with techniques such as funnel visualization, where visitors came from, how long they stayed and their geographical position. It also provides more advanced features, including custom visitor segmentation.
Google Analytics e-commerce reporting can track sales activity and performance. The e-commerce reports shows a site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics.
A user can have 50 site profiles. Each profile generally corresponds to one website. It is limited to sites which have a traffic of fewer than 5 million page-views per month (roughly 2 page-views per second), unless the site is linked to an AdWords campaign.