Google Analytics for Beginners: Getting Started with GA4

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool that helps marketers better understand their site’s overall performance.

Unlike Google Search Console, which provides detailed data about how users discover websites through Google organic (meaning unpaid) search, Google Analytics deals with all traffic sources. Including organic search, paid search, social media, and more.

And beyond telling you how your users arriveon your site, it has data that tells you what they do after they arrive. That includes which pages they view and what actions they take.

Google Analytics can also seem complicated and confusing at first. But it doesn’t have to be.

In this guide, we’ll teach you the basics of Google Analytics and help you install it on your site.

Let’s start with a brief history.

Universal Analytics

Universal Analytics (UA) is no longer the current version of Google Analytics. But it is the version that made Google Analytics famous.

It became widespread across the digital marketing world after the beta version was released in 2012.

How widespread? The various versions of Google Analytics have a greater than 70% share of the web analytics software market, according to Statista.

Here’s what the dashboard looked like:

But you won’t see it these days.

That’s because Universal Analytics was set to stop processing new data in standard accounts on July 1, 2023. So marketers started adjusting to the new Google Analytics 4.

Google Analytics 4

Google...