This article is the second of a series of three articles aiming to answer to What is Analytics, Why, When and How to use it
In my previous article, we discussed why Analytics is a great mean to drive your product. We will now take a look at one of the most famous Analytics tool.
The purpose of this article is to give you a brief but nonetheless actionable knowledge of what you can do with Google Analytics (GA), and at first, why you would use GA.
Before even digging into the tool itself, let's detail why you would use GA instead of another solution.
On the bright side, GA is:
On the dark side, GA is:
For most Analytics needs, GA is a terrific solution, it has many more pros than cons. And I personally chose to use it with success many times.
However if you feel that something is missing or wrong, or that a new challenger entered the scene, please tell us in the comments section!
A dimension represents an attribute (a characteristic) of an entity, like:
Whereas a metric is an aggregated numeric value used for analyzing and comparing dimensions:
For a proper analysis, one does not come without the other, the dimension gives a definition and scope to your analysis, and the metric a point of comparison.
GA has many dimensions (and you can even create yours), categorized in the tool as:
However as soon as you want to start refining your analysis, creating reports and calculating values, you will need to find external solutions to GA, since GA user interface does not include those features. And to do so, it is good to know how the data is stored in the database of GA.
Each time a user "interacts" (as long as the interaction is tracked), a hit is sent to GA and stored in a time-series database (DB). You can picture this type of DB as a huge and unique table where each "hit" takes up one line and where the columns are mainly dimensions (hence attributes of hits). Then Google aggregates (counts) by dimensions to feed the metrics of its pre-configured user interface.
What's more interesting is by handling this DB by yourself, you can very easily do your own aggregation with specific business rules in order to calculate and compare advanced complex KPIs.
In the following article, I tell you how to implement Google Analytics for React Native.
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