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What are your employment goals? GA Academy is free and the courses only take about 4 hours each. It's a very small time investment if you think it might be useful. I work for a fortune 200 in a Global Analytics capacity. GA is part of our tech stack because so many colleagues are familiar with it and can use it to self-serve if we create a quick dashboard so they can answer their own questions over time. It's not my main focus, but I use it almost every day even if we are just accessing the data through API to blend with other data sources. More on reddit.com

First you set up an account for Google Analytics. You give your name, your domain (your website address), your emails, and whatever else.

Analytics then gives you some code. All you have to do is copy this code (it's pretty short) onto the beginning of your website, in your "header" which is typically loaded at the beginning of every page. If you like, you could load it only on certain pages.

When someone goes to your website, your browser downloads the entire page like usual, including the Analytics code.

What the Analytics code actually does is simply record things that your browser tells the web pages anyway. Things like location (country, city), language, browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc), operating system (Windows, Mac OSX, etc), screen resolution, and many other things that browsers always tell every website they go to. This info is required for the web to function correctly. All Analytics does is record it and present it to you with graphs and charts.

Edit: here is what the actual code looks like. It's in a language called JavaScript.

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', '**********']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

I censored the account number, though (line 2). This code "includes" code that is hosted (saved on) the Google servers. So, every time you visit the page, the browser comes across this, reads the code on the Google servers (really quickly, of course) where Google records the info, then finishes loading the page.

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Most.. websites... use Google Analytics? There are many branches of analytics. Web Analytics typically falls into the marketing/sales side of the company. If you're spending any sort of money or time on marketing/sales, then web analytics is typically how you attempt to measure and quantify the success of your investments. Even if your investment is just time, it's still worth understanding what content works, how users are different, is anything broken, etc. Your website is often the first or most visible touchpoint that customers have with your organization. It certainly changes by industry. I worked at a consultancy, so I've worked with Google Analytics for almost every industry, though usually larger companies. Usually related to new user acquisition and growth, but depending on the site, also continued engagement for existing customers. Before this, I worked at a company that was a behind-the-scenes organization. They did not need to attract new customers, they didn't want people to know their name. In that role, I focused entirely on internal data and utilization. More on reddit.com