Google has a platform for tracking your online visitors called “Analytics” that often is bucketed into terms such as Google Analytics, GA, or even just Analytics. According to Google, “Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.”

People use the platform to understand the behaviors of people who visit their websites, applications, and online stores so they can improve their experiences, add more revenue, and create better customers. Google Analytics is a robust tool for businesses to learn about the way that their visitors interact with them online.

Google Analytics is simply a tool for measuring online visitors, so the value for a business is how the tool is used. Fundamentally all applications of Google Analytics should be tied to goals such as: what need does my website or application solve for or what product or service does my website promote? If you can answer either of those questions, then you know what your goal is and from there you can track your capabilities to achieve those goals using the resources your business has. Therefore, the value lies in how well you can use the tool to achieve your specific business goals – and for some, that means Google Analytics is one of the most necessary tools in their tool belts.

Google Analytics tracks (at this time) four main scopes of interactions from online visitors to websites and applications: hits, sessions, users, and products.

Hits are specific visitor interactions with a website or application like a click, touch, video play, scroll, dwell time, typing, and various other outputs. Sessions are groupings of time where multiple hits occur that constitutes a visit to the website or application. Users are the visitors denoted by the unique cookie ID that is assigned by Google’s script to that visitor so that each hit and session can be traced back to the originating actor. Products (and other scopes that might arise) are additional contexts that describe and relate to a product, content, or service that is being interacted with (somewhat like a category).

From these scopes, we can see the various groupings of interactions occurring on a website or in an application so that a business can understand a specific engagement and improve it using that tracked data.

Google Analytics is a platform for website analytics data and call tracking is a platform for phone call analytics data. The two platforms only cross-over where a website visitor also performs a phone call. When the two are used together you can bridge the interactions that someone is having on a website or application and their phone call conversation to build a more complete journey of consumers.

Depending on how much your business relies on its website or upon its phones will indicate how you would use Google Analytics and call tracking together to generate more consistent business. Being able to see the complete journey of consumers will help you see the influence that either channel has on your business.

CallSource’s EveryLead product and Google’s Analytics platform integrate by collecting similar data in tandem that joins together after receiving phone calls to your business. After a phone call ends, an event is sent into Google Analytics and matches up with the unique Google Analytics cookie ID so that all of the phone call information from EveryLead is synchronized with all of the Google Analytics insights.

Events can then be turned into Goals or evaluated separately to learn how channels, web pages, and devices that impact the phone calls, appointments, and sales generated by phone calls.

Google has some of the best support for businesses to learn more about Google Analytics. They offer an academy (which is recommended for hands-on learners) so that you can understand the fastest way to jump in and improve from web and application analytics.