Google Analytics (GA) is an website measurement platform that tracks how users interact with your site content.
Things such as how many users, sessions, returning users etc… are measured, as well as things such as the language & location of your users.
Custom goals & conversion values can also be implemented for detailed user measurement.
Tracking pixels are fired when a user accesses a piece of content on your site & the tag loads.
These pixels contain bits of information on the time, user’s source & other metrics.
As a user ventures throughout your site from page to page, a new pixel is fired on each page; and once the user leaves the pixels’ data is reverse engineered to show the information that you see in the platform.
Using Google Analytics To Troubleshoot Website Issues
Google Analytics has many segments that can be used to troubleshoot common website issues.
Pages with unusually high bounce rates & exits should be viewed for page load speed issues.
If there are no page load speed issues, checking the network domain can identify if the traffic is real or “ghost” traffic, which occurs when crawlers are accessing your site content.
If you find that you are receiving heavy amount of ghost traffic, you should look to filter it out in a specific view that is not the primary, unfiltered data.
This will maintain data integrity in your reporting as they will be focused on real user engagement.
Using Google Analytics To Improve User Experience
Most of the metrics relayed in Google Analytics pertain to how the user interacts with your site content when they visit.
In addition to that, custom goals and metrics can also be set up to see how users are interacting with your site.
Based on the data that you see, you can begin to make optimizations to existing content, future content strategy, as well as the website’s technical performance for areas that are not performing well.