What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is Google's free website analytics tool. It tells you how many people visit your site, where they come from, what they do, and which of those visits turn into sales or leads.
What it measures
At its simplest, Google Analytics answers: how many visitors, from which channels, doing what, with what result. You add a small tag to your site, and every visit and action gets recorded so you can see traffic sources, popular pages, and conversions in the reports.
GA4 is the version you have now
Today "Google Analytics" means GA4, which replaced the older Universal Analytics in 2023. GA4 measures everything as events and works across websites and apps. If a guide or agency still talks about sessions and bounce rate the old way, it is out of date.
What it is good at, and its limits
- Good at: free, powerful traffic and behaviour reporting, and it connects neatly to Google Ads.
- Limits: it only counts what your tags send, it depends on consent, and reports lag a day or two.
Most "Analytics is wrong" problems are really setup problems: a tag not firing, a missing key event, or consent blocking measurement.
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