Google Analytics and why you should have it

Do you know what shoe size you wear? Do you know how many pairs of shoes you have in your closet?

I am a size five wide or six in some countries and I have 15 pairs of shoes in my closet. Why is this important?  With the information, I am able to make quick decisions on what to wear and when.

Using the same principal Publishers are expected to understand their users and what interests brings them to their site. This is achieved by using third-party tools such as google analytics, Chartbeat or any other analytical tool that captures users interests and journey on your website. 

One of the reliable reporting tools is Google Analytics which is free and easy to use. Google analytics was acquired by Google and launched in November 2005. 

The tool is designed to ping your website by adding a java code that drops a  cookie on the users' browser that records all user’s interactions on your website. 

Why is this important to publishers? By understanding a users journey to your website and within your website will influence the website design and the content written for user consumption. 

Google Analytics records the who, how, where and when of every user interaction within your website using metrics such as page views, sessions, time spent on the site and dimensions such as City, Language, Devices or traffic source.

What are metrics and dimensions? A metric is a quantitative measurement of user interaction on your platform while dimensions are the attributes of the data collected.  For example, a Device breakdown is a dimension and a pageview is a metric.

Basic google analytics metrics and dimensions terms to understand as you analyze your report

1. Pageviews - A page view (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is an instance of a page being loaded (or reloaded) in a browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed.
2. Sessions  - The period of time a user is active on your site or app. By default, if a user is inactive for 30 minutes or more, any future activity is attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session.
3. Bounce rate - Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server

How to set up google analytics for a website?

In four easy steps:

1. Go to google.com/analytics and create an account
2.  Set up a property in your Analytics account. A property represents your website or app and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.
3. Set up a reporting view of your property. Views let you create filtered perspectives of your data; for example, all data except your company’s internal IP addresses, or all data associated with a specific sales region.
4. Follow the instructions to add the tracking code to your websites so you can collect data in your Analytics property.