Utilizing Google Analytics in 2024
Published in Technology on February 8, 2024 | 11 min read
Written by Theertha Babu , SEO Analyst @Woxro, Skilled at identifying key technical insights and translating them into clear, engaging content that aligns with business objectives.

Google Analytics, or "GA" for short is one of the most-used analytical tools that ensure a deep into inspection on the website or even app performance. Therefore, it remains a great option for site administrators and marketing teams of old who expect tools from the American tech giant, Google. GA is integrated with other Google-branded marketing and advertisement tools like Google Ads, Search Console, Data Studio while coming both free and paid options, which is called Analytics 360. Free version of this product will easily accommodate small and medium-sized enterprises; however, the paid version of this will also provide additional features that include full-funnel analytics, strong attribution frameworks, added reports, enhanced views, measurements, and unlimited, unsorted data. But a yearly charge of $150,000 could be spread over a monthly rate for Analytics 360 would be justifiable for companies which meet the size requirement and have a few key resources.
Then such an investment could be justified when complemented by personal account managers and specialized service from an outside right expertise who would analyze in due and proper manner afterwards the data.
Using Google Analytics, You must have a Google account for Google Analytics; this automatically means you must have an attached registered Google account with an email address and a password.
You cannot gain immediate access to GA just because you have signed up with a Google account. You do need to apply to sign up for Analytics, in fact. But if you are to configure the GA properly you also need to know its structure; specifically, the term "hierarchy."
Google Analytics Hierarchy, Four components of the GA hierarchy, but listed in greatest to least are Ownership, View, Organisation, and Account.
Each component is described in detail below:
- Organisation
The highest possible in the GA hierarchy, an organisation can sit. The reason is that it encompasses a fully formed organisation, which could encompass thousands of Google Analytics accounts. For large-scale companies, organisations are not required but rather available for use.
- Account(s)
Accounts lie at the other end of the pyramid. One needs no less than an account to start using Google Analytics. One kind of account is not a user account. If they are allowed to do so, members from any organization are free to login in to the hundreds and thousands of Google Analytics accounts of the company using their personal Google email ID.
Interesting is that every report can be set to have one or more properties. There are up to 50 properties in a report. A user account's Analytics, a single property in one account, or a single view of a property can be admitted. It makes it possible.
- Asset
A property is actually a site, or an application. Every property can have up to 25 views.
- Observe
You need at least two views per property: One is raw, meaning unconfigured-it's the view itself. One has filters set up to deny bot and spam traffic, and all your own company's traffic besides (say, a filter based on your IP). A view does not start to start collecting data until filters and settings you have tailored are in play. Any data that has been purged from a view is not recovered. It is crucial to have an unfiltered view of your data for the foregoing reasons. Immediately after going through the standard setup procedures of GA, the following steps are mandatory to begin using the tool.
How to Use Google Analytics
- Log into a Google Analytics account
This must first be preceded by logging in either for an already existing account or creating a Google Analytics account. Add the name of your website, address, and the industry you want to track.
Choose the account to add the property you need. There you will be prompted to create and name your property. Also, you must fill out the website URL, industry, and time zone. You are given analytics information based on this.
- Setting a view for your property
To do this, go to the property and account you'd like to add a view. You can do so from the "Create View" menu. You'll be asked several questions to complete the creation of your view, aside from naming it and deciding on the kind of view you prefer. Web or application, that is. Reminder: you're entitled to up to 25 views on a single site in Google Analytics.
- Insert your tracking code right after your site's tag
For each property that you create, Google Analytics generates a specific tracking ID and tag for your website (technically sometimes called a "Site Tag"); you must insert this code on all pages of sites whose performance you wish to track; that is how you get data about your property. Copy the tag and paste it just behind the opening tag on all pages you wish to track.
You are going to be given a type of site you use: static, dynamic, hosting, or Google Tag Manager to help you sort through your collection well. Finally, run out to validate whether the code is functioning properly by visiting your Google Analytics portal.
Lastly, you'll test your code to make sure it's actually working. You can do this by clicking on your site in another tab or on your phone while you're looking at the "Real-Time Reports" section of your GA dashboard. Of course you'll probably be the biggest visitor to the site, as the report should show.
You are now ready to act based on this information. Before you go any further, as a prerequisite, you will need to understand the different dimensions in terms of measurement, statistics, and performance indicators amongst hundreds of others before moving forward.
Even more things you have to learn before using Google Analytics to track
- Dimensions and metrics in Google Analytics
Metrics are counts and, by definition, they are automatically quantitative in nature while dimensions would fall into categories of categorical variables.
Simply put, it means there exist dimensions like the type of browser, location, type of landing page, device type, customer type, etc. Now, metrics would include things like sessions, page visits, conversions, bounce rate, length of session, and many more.
For all your metrics and KPIs you will find columns that always precede them. Your horizontal rows in Google Analytics reports will represent for you dimensions.
- Special Measurements and Dimensions
With Google Analytics, you can create customized dimensions and statistics based not just on the data from Analytics but on other systems such as CRM. For instance, you may be able to measure the kind of membership each customer has when they signed up in your CRM. And, incidentally, you can demonstrate which pages are viewed by customer type by combining such a metric with GA's "page views." Or if your business is a blog, most likely you'd care about knowing how the engagement of your audience influences other metrics or performance indicators, like conversion rates, pages per session, etc.
For instance, you can define three types of dimensions for each type of visitor: People who subscribed to your newsletter, paid for VIP access to your website, and shared content from your site on social media You will undoubtedly obtain relevant data for each category of website visit with the dimension highlighted above.
What is an audience in Google Analytics?
An audience refers to a class of people with something in common. It could be age or geographical origin. You could, for example, target the Belgian consumer and then have a "Belgian audience" purely for that group. For your online business, you will target the millennials specifically so you will build an audience between the ages of 25-40 years old.
Fortunately, Google Analytics provides a few ready-made audiences-for instance the ones we just discussed on age and geolocation. Something you don't have to do to edit them-that's because these audience reports are automatically built in GA, based on your visitor data as you add the tracking code.
However, you can also create your own custom audiences. Let's say you only want to attract millennials in Belgium, right? Then you can build a custom audience that would encompass visitors who are within the country of Belgium and in the appropriate age range.
That far, of course, dramatically eases the task of collecting an audience. The harder question is still one of how to discover what user attributes actually will help you hit your business objectives.
What is a segment in Google Analytics?
Like a subset of your data - a fraction. A few examples that you can use to get the segments rolling are,
Users-for example, anyone who has registered, purchased anything on your web site so far, etc Sessions-for example, every session that viewed a pricing page, every session that originated from a specific marketing campaign, etc. Conversions-for example, when the order was over 50 euros or when a specific product was in the cart As we mentioned earlier, for the audiences we discussed just above, Google Analytics provides many pre-built segments. However, with GA's "Segment Builder, you can get much more granular with your segmentation, which has virtually unlimited options.
You may add as many as four blocks at a time to any report before moving forward into the "Reports" section.
Google Analytics reports
There are five types of reporting options found in the left-hand sidebar of Google Analytics. Clicking on any one of those will expand to include other options: Real-Time, Acquisition, Hearing, Conversion, Behavior.
Let's walk through each of these types of reports below.
- Real-time reports in Google Analytics
Real-Time Reporting, as the name might give away, gives you an overview of activity on site as you watch your screen. You'll get to see who's visiting your website, what they access, what social media they're using, and a lot more based on their location, etc. That's really the least interesting of the lot, although it's fun to look at at times. But here are some sensible uses for the real-time report:
Find out what traffic a new blog post or social media post brings in. Find out right away if a sale or event that takes place during the day brings in views, visits, or conversions. Verify that the custom events and tracking URLs you recently defined function as intended. The other kinds of reports are far more interesting, as you will see.
- Audience report from Google Analytics
You can obtain an overview of the property by viewing the GA Audience Report. Thus, you can review this report once a day to gain insight into your overall patterns. Expandable menus pertaining to “Demographics”, “Interests”, “Geography”, “Behavior”, “Technology”, “Mobile”, “Multi-device”, and so on will appear when you click on “Audiences”. There are also several other categories that we shall explain below. Intact Users Since this information can be found in the "real-time reporting" area, in actuality, the category of "active users" does not contain users who are presently on your website.
The number of users who visited in the previous week (7 day active users), last day (1 day active users), or more (14 day active users, 28 day active users, etc.) is displayed to you in the Active Users report. What is this report's worth? Clearly, you are having trouble keeping your audience engaged if you have more one-time users than regular ones. Visitors don't return to your website or application. And you'll need to make an effort to comprehend why. This report can also be used with different segments, so you can observe, for example, that users in a particular age group have a retention rate that is significantly higher than normal.
- Lifespan
Just like Customer Life Value, the "Lifetime Value" report will tell you how much value a user is to your business. You might, for example notice that the lifetime value of consumers whom you obtained through email marketing is different from those whom you get through organic search. Then, knowing that, you might identify what kind of channel will need more investment. The maximum lifetime value is 90 days. On the other hand, acquisition date range, which are customizable includes any user you have added within that time period.
Let's say you want to see the transactions per user of all the users that you added in the week before Black Friday. You customize your date range especially for that week. And then you'll be given the average transactions per user for that cohort in the next ninety days.
- Cohort Analysis
Cohort analysis, says some marketers is probably the most powerful report of Google Analytics.
How does it work? This report groups users by "Acquisition Date" properties. Acquisition date is the first time a user visited your website.
There are many options, but first and foremost, you need to decide on the cohort size: you may want it to be daily, weekly, or monthly. Next, you may set whatever it is that you want to analyze for the given cohort or your KPI in particular. Finally, a "per user," "retention," and "total" option will help you earn some money from even more granular analysis.
Per user is a share of the quantity of the chosen performance indicator divided by cohort size. For example, if you choose "Transactions per user," what you are going to get is the average number of transactions for that cohort per user. User retention calculation is based on the cohort size you have chosen. Number of users returned in a day, week, or month by the total number of users in that cohort.
For this cohort size, total refers to the overall sessions, transactions, etc., that took place.
Finally, select the date range. You can retrieve Google Analytics information for up to three months.
Acquisition reports through Google Analytics
It breaks traffic down by source in the Acquisition report. Email, social media, paid search, and display are some items under the source category, but there are many more. Google Analytics automatically labels a generic portion of the traffic with a category called "Other" if it can't find a way to classify a part of the traffic. The drop-down selection from the "All Traffic" menu is the Channels tab; you can select any category and then drill down further for each source.
You can view landing pages-the URL from which your visitors came to your site-source-the website that led them to your site-and even keyword-the query that led them to your site-based on category too.
To see this in a more graph-like fashion, click on "All Traffic > Treemaps". Another kind of report that drills down further on the high-level category of traffic you probably saw in "Channels" is Source/Medium and it's just above. If you want to know more details about how visitors get to your website, this is useful. In the example, you see that only 5% of referral traffic comes from Twitter and 60% coming from LinkedIn. Depending on what your marketing group thinks is important, it may be time to make some course corrections.
Google Analytics Behavior Reports
The "Site Content" section gives you an overview of all of your blog entries, landing pages and web pages contained on your site. There are a ton of cool reports here in this "Behaviour Reports" section.
Every page You can view the most popular pages for your current view and/or section by selecting "Site Content> All Pages." That is a useful function because, above all, it lets you track the most popular URLs you visit and, most significantly, it lets you track the increase or drop of your traffic.
To help you see which pages received the least amount of traffic and which may have contributed to this decline, go to "Site Content > All Pages" and make sure you compare the date range for this month vs. last month, so that you're comparing equivalent days of the week .
- Content investigation
This analysis breaks down the structure of your website subdomain by subdirectory. For vast enterprises managing extremely complex assets, such a report is pretty useful.
- Pages that land
According to Google Analytics, a landing page refers to the first page of a session, or the visitor's initial interaction with your website.
This report has several uses. For instance, you could further condition this dimension with Source/Medium if you were interested in the sources (paid social, direct, organic, etc.) that drive consumers to the landing page. You can add a corresponding segment to view only the landing pages the users from a given source, platform, or category have visited. Use mobile and tablet traffic for instance, if you are only interested in knowing the pages visited by visitors on their smartphones or tablets.
Or, alternatively, choose the "Made a Purchase" segment if you are interested in knowing users who have actually made a purchase. There are many more.
- Site speed
No explanation of the name is required for this type of report-it tells you how fast users can get to your website. Speed does matter as Google's algorithm takes into consideration page load time in addition to faster pages being associated with greater income .
- Event progression
The Event Flow report tracks the sequence of events happening on your website. You can get the following data from it:
whether some events often happen first and trigger further events. Users may often watch your demo video and then click the CTA to schedule a meeting with the sales representative.
For instance, for an e-shop, the user may be requested to fill in the form with confirmation of an order, add goods to his/her basket, register on their mailing list, and so on. Media companies, by contrast, are interested in earning as much money from ads as possible by keeping a user on the website as long as possible and visiting the number of the pages demanded.
Whereby, B2B organizations are searching for visitors to schedule a call with a salesperson, download an ebook or subscribe to a webinar. All these and many more can be tracked with Google Analytics.
As a goal is just a determined conversion, this information may be found under the Conversion section.
Whether some types of events happen more often than others. For instance, such a report would alert you to the fact that many more users are watching video files on your website than are downloading the PDF files. If users react differently based on a given sector:. In fact, this alone accounts for a multitude of other reports, like events—GA defines as user interactions with content that could be measured independent of a web page or page load —under the category of "Behaviour Reports." screen), usage, pages, search phrases, etc.
Google Analytics: Conversion Reports
If you have a website you probably have one or more goals to which the visitors to your site relate. There are four broad categories of goals in GA.
- Final Destination
When a user lands on a certain page—like the product page, order confirmation page, or thank you page—this objective is accomplished.
- Occurrence
This goal is met when the defined event takes place-for example, any events you can have pre-defined, such as the view of a movie or posting a message to social media.
- Duration
This objective is met if the user remains inside of a session for longer than you have defined.
- Pages/screens viewed in a session
This objective is met if the user reads a specified number of pages (or screens for an application) in one session. Proceed to "Overview" to view how you are doing overall on the goals.
The conversion section of Google Analytics also has a whole range of other useful report types available, like Funnel Visualisation, which, amongst other things, tell you exactly where in the funnel your prospects have deserted you. There is just nothing left to do but to begin using Google Analytics and learn about all the features.

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