Google Universal Analytics (UA) vs. Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Course overview

Uplatz offers this comprehensive course on Google Analytics. It is a self-paced course with video lectures. You will be awarded Course Completion Certificate at the end of the course.

Google Analytics, or GA, is an analytics tool that gives you an extremely in-depth look at your website and/or app performance. It integrates with Google's marketing and advertising platforms and products (including Google Ads, Search Console, and Data Studio) making it a popular choice for anyone using multiple Google tools. If you want a lot of data — and more importantly, have the time and ability to analyze and act on it — GA is a great fit. However, GA takes time to set up, learn, implement, maintain, and use.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is available for free to anyone with a Google account.

Google Analytics is used to track website performance and collect visitor insights. It can help organizations determine top sources of user traffic, gauge the success of their marketing activities and campaigns, track goal completions (such as purchases, adding products to carts), discover patterns and trends in user engagement and obtain other visitor information such as demographics. Small and medium-sized retail websites often use Google Analytics to obtain and analyze various customer behavior analytics, which can be used to improve marketing campaigns, drive website traffic and better retain visitors.

How does Google Analytics work?
Google Analytics acquires user data from each website visitor through the use of page tags. A JavaScript page tag is inserted into the code of each page. This tag runs in the web browser of each visitor, collecting data and sending it to one of Google's data collection servers. Google Analytics can then generate customizable reports to track and visualize data such as the number of users, bounce rates, average session durations, sessions by channel, page views, goal completions and more.

The page tag functions as a web bug or web beacon, to gather visitor information. However, because it relies on cookies, the system can't collect data for users who have disabled them.

Google Analytics includes features that can help users identify trends and patterns in how visitors engage with their websites. Features enable data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting and integration with other applications. These features include:

• data visualization and monitoring tools, including dashboards, scorecards and motion charts that display changes in data over time
• data filtering, manipulation and funnel analysis
• data collection application program interfaces (APIs)
• predictive analytics, intelligence and anomaly detection
• segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions
• custom reports for advertising, acquisition, audience behavior and conversion
• email-based sharing and communication
• integration with other products, including Google Ads, Google Data Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google AdSense, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Display & Video 360, Google Ad Manager and Google Search Console

Within the Google Analytics dashboard, users can save profiles for multiple websites and either see details for default categories or select custom metrics to display for each site. Available categories for tracking include content overview, keywords, referring sites, visitors overview, map overlay and traffic sources overview.

The dashboard can be viewed on the Google Analytics site and is available through a widget or a plugin for embedding into other sites. Customized Google Analytics dashboards are also available from independent vendors.

Is Google Analytics free?
There's a free and a paid version of GA (the latter is called Analytics 360). Small and medium-sized businesses will likely get all the features you need from the free version. Enterprise businesses need to upgrade if you want:

• Advanced funnel reporting and attribution modeling
• Roll-up reporting
• More views, dimensions, and metrics per property
• Unlimited and unsampled data