Google Analytics is Google’s web analytics service to track and report website traffic as a platform in the Google Marketing Platform brand. This service was launched in November 2005.

Google Analytics is the most widely implemented web analytics service on the web in the year 2019. It gives an SDK that helps gather data usage from iOS and Android apps known as Google Analytics for Mobile Apps. It can be blocked by browsers, browser extensions, firewalls, and others. 

Google Analytics has had many iterations since its inception. The 4th version is currently in use, and it is called GA4. It is the default Google Analytics installation, and it is the renamed App + Web Property that was deployed in 2019 by Google as a Beta version. It has now replaced Universal Analytics (UA). A good prospect of GA4 is natural integration with Google’s BigQuery. It was previously used in the enterprise GA360. Google has invested efforts to integrate GA and its users into their wider cloud service offering. 

Google Analytics is co-implemented with page tags known as Google Analytics Tracking Code. It is a JavaScript snippet that is added to every page of the website by the developer. This tracking code runs on the client’s browser whenever the client browses if JavaScript is enabled in the browser. It collects the browser’s data and stores it in the Google data collection server as a request for a web beacon. The JavaScript snippet tracking code loads a massive JavaScript file from the Google web server. It then sets variables using the user's account number. This JavaScript file, known as ga.js, was of size 40 kB in May 2018. 

The JavaScript file does not usually require loading because of the browser caching feature. If the caching is enabled in the browser settings, it automatically downloads ga.js once while the browsing starts. A browser that has visited some websites previously running Google Analytics will already contain the file cached on their device as all the websites implementing Google Analytics with ga.js code use the same master file stored in Google. 

Along with transmitting data to the Google server, the Javascript snippet tracking code sets a first-party cookie, i.e., if the cookies are enabled in the browser, on every browser’s device. Enabling this cookie will store anonymous data known as ClientId. Before Universal Analytics (UA) was launched, several other cookies were used to store data, such as whether the user had previously visited the site to check if the visitor is new or returning visitor, the timestamp of the present browsing, and the referrer site or the campaign that directs the users to a particular page. For example, search engines, keywords, banners, or emails. 

The Google Analytics certificate course offered by Great Learning will help our learners with details of what Google Analytics is, how it works, what are its uses and benefits, etc. You will be able to understand the complete working of different versions and be capable of working with the tool to understand various metrics of your data. At the end of the course, you will be able to deal with Google data efficiently. You can enroll in a free Google Analytics course to learn more about the subject. You will earn a certificate on successful completion of the tutorial. Happy Learning!