What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics was launched in November 2005 according to Brian Clifton's blog post making the software over 14 years old. As it states in the name, Google Analytics is analytical software that allows website owners to to monitor activity on their website.

The software is free for anyone who has a website to register up to

Benefits of Installing Google Analytics

One of the fundamental advantages to having Google Analytics installed on your website is to monitor how many users visit your website. Using Google Analytics we can break this down into further segments by finding out how many users visited your website from a specific day, month or custom date range that you specify.

From a business owners point of view, this may be useful in certain use cases if you were to test a different marketing approach. By doing a comparison between different date ranges, you'll easily be able to identify the difference between how many users you had before, and after, your new campaign ran.

This includes metrics such as:

• Bounce Rate - How long your users stay on your page
• The users location - View-able as either county or city
• Conversions - The amount of people that converted on your website.

Integration with Google Adwords

If you have ever, or thought about running paid PPC (pay per click) campaigns through either Google Adwords or Bing, setting up Google Analytics can provide you with even more insightful data.

But isn't this against GDPR and HIPPA regulations?

Google Analytics has come under scrutiny against various data protection regulations, however due to refining the analytics software to not personally identify a specific user, this type of software by-passes all types of data protection laws that are set in place.