How does Google Analytics work?

- [Instructor] Before we dive into the Google Analytics platform, I want to talk first about what's going on under the hood. By understanding how Google Analytics works, you'll be better equipped to identify problems with your setup or understand why certain data anomalies might occur. There are four components to how the Google Analytics system works: Data Collection, Configuration, Data Processing, and Reporting. To track a website, Google Analytics uses a small snippet of JavaScript code. You'll place this code on every page of your website and when a user arrives, the code comes alive and starts to collect data on how the user engages with your site.

Some of the data comes from the website itself, like the URL of the pages that the user is viewing. Other data is collected from the user's browser, like the language the browser is set to, the browser name, and the device and operating system used to access the site. And this is how you can see, say, if most of your users are Mac or PC, or iPhone or Android. The JavaScript can also collect information on what content is viewed, for how long, and even the referring source that brought the user to the site in the first place, say, a blog that linked to your site, or a Facebook post.

All of this information is then pushed to Google Analytics servers to await processing. Google looks at each piece of data as an interaction or a hit. And every time your user visits a new page on your site, the code collects and sends new or updated information about the user's activity. And now that Google has all of this information, they'll start processing it. And this can take anywhere from four to 24 hours. You can think of processing as the step that takes all of this raw information and turns it into something useful.

From there, Google will organize the information. It's going to categorize users by whether they're new or returning. It'll determine their length of the stay on the site, and it'll even link together all the pages they've viewed in the order they viewed them in. It's also at this stage that Google applies any configuration settings you've pre-set for that raw data. And we're going to talk more on those later, but an example of this would be if you want to exclude, say, yourself or you office from appearing in your reports. Once your data is then processed, it's going to be stored in a database.

From here, the last element is reporting. And this is what we'll be spending the majority of this course looking at. You're going to be accessing reporting through the Google Analytics web interface, and it's there that you can interact with all of your data. Now, it is possible to grab the data using Google's API but we're not going to be covering that in this course. Now, there's a lot more that does go on under the hood to make Google Analytics possible. If you're really curious, you can explore Google's documentation in the Google Developer Guidelines.

It's dense reading but it does give you an even closer look at how all of these elements work together.