Is it just me, or is Google Analytics not that needed ?
How do I start learning Google Analytics ?
Not sure about other people, but I learn by tinkering. And since you probably don't have a site on which to implement GA, Google does have a demo account that would allow you to start exploring.
Good luck!
More on reddit.comELI5: Google Analytics. How does it work and what is the information used for?
Who uses Google Analytics?
Why do you need Google Analytics?
Whether you run a blog or want to promote a new business website, there are some vital questions to answer that will help you understand what’s working for you and what’s not.
- How many people visit your website?
- Where do your website visitors live?
- How are people getting to your site?
- Which pages on your site are the most popular?
- How many visitors have you converted into leads?
- What kind of content attracts the most viewers?
- What devices do your website viewers use?
Google Analytics integrates with an entire suite of marketing products such as Google Ads and Google Data Studio. The tool combines data from multiple points to create an incredibly detailed map that will help you navigate your audience. The more you learn about your people, the better you’ll be at giving them what they want.
What is a session in Google Analytics?
What is the difference between 'Sessions' and 'Users' in Google Analytics?
Videos
Most Analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics...) are non-compliant to GDPR, and for others, you would have to show a cookie consent banner that negatively impacts the user experience.
Adding to that the fact that you would depend on a third party which may impact the performance of your web pages.
So, why do we insist on capturing users' data through these analytics third party when we can simply set up a log visualization tool at the server level, and get the important data from log files (number of unique visitors, viewed pages, referrers, user-agent...) ?
Maybe Analytics tools have the benefit of providing detailed metrics, but these would only be useful if your business depends on user behavior tracking, which isn't the case for many websites out there.
Am I missing something here?