I recently took a course on Google Analytics- Digital Analytics Fundamentals. I found this course to be very informative and strongly recommend that every Marketer take it to gain some basic knowledge of Google’s free service. Below are a few things that I learned:

How Google Analytics actually works:

1. Data Collection: To track a website, Google Analytics uses a small piece of JavaScript code to collect information. This piece of code must be placed on every page of the website. The JavaScript code will collect various pieces of information about how users engage with your site.
2. Data Processing: This step is the “transformation” step; which turns raw data into something more useful.
3. Configuration: This step allows you to add filters to your data, which is then stored in a database.
4. Reporting: In this step, you will use Google Analytics to access your data. Use google.com/analytics.

Why should Marketers learn Google Analytics? Well, why wouldn’t you want to keep track of who’s visiting your website, the characteristics of your users, how they found your site, and who you should be targeting. Understanding the services that Google Analytics offers is a great tool to understand how your business is performing by providing companies with a wide range of reports on how frequent visitors return to your site, how much time they spend on a specific page, and which medium they used to get to your website. All this information can help you to better understand your company’s ROI and essentially, where your digital marketing funds should be going.

Happy Analyzing!