What Can Google Analytics Do?

Thinking about your website’s performance without Google Analytics is like driving in a new city without a map. Google Analytics is that map, showing you exactly who your visitors are, where they came from, and what they do once they arrive. This guide will walk you through the core capabilities of Google Analytics and explain how to use these insights to make smarter decisions for your business.

Understand Who Your Visitors Are

The first step to growing your business is understanding your customer. Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about your website visitors through its Audience reports, turning anonymous traffic into detailed user profiles.

Demographics: Who Are They?

Google Analytics can show you the age, gender, and interests of your audience. This isn’t just trivia, it’s actionable intelligence.

Imagine you run an e-commerce store selling high-end running shoes and assume your target customers are male athletes aged 25-34. After checking your Analytics, you discover that a significant portion of your buyers are actually women aged 35-44. This insight can completely reshape your marketing strategy, from the imagery you use in your ads to the content you post on social media.

Geographics: Where Are They From?

Knowing your audience’s location (country, state, or even city) and primary language helps you tailor their experience. For instance, if you notice a growing number of visitors from Australia, you might consider:

• Offering shipping options specifically for Australia.
• Running ads targeted to Australian cities.
• Tweaking your content schedule to align with their time zone.

This data reveals opportunities for international growth you might not have known existed.

Technology & Mobile: How Do They Browse?

The Technology reports tell you what devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) and browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) people use to access your site. In today’s market, mobile traffic is dominant for most websites. If your Analytics shows that 75% of your traffic comes from smartphones, but your mobile conversion rate is terrible, that’s a massive red flag. It tells you that you need to prioritize optimizing your mobile checkout process or improving site speed on mobile devices.

Discover How People Find Your Website

It’s not enough to know who your visitors are, you also need to know how they found you. The Acquisition reports in Google Analytics break this down, showing you which marketing channels are working and which ones are not.

All Traffic: Channels & Source/Medium

This is arguably the most-used report in Google Analytics. It breaks down your traffic into default channels:

• Organic Search: Visitors who found you through a search engine like Google or Bing. This is a measure of your SEO success.
• Direct: Visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. This often reflects brand recognition.
• Social: Visitors from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or X (Twitter).
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website (e.g., a blog post or a partner’s website).
• Paid Search: Visitors who clicked on one of your paid ads, like Google Ads.
• Email: Visitors who came from a link in one of your email marketing campaigns.

Digging into the Source/Medium report provides even more detail. You’ll see exactly where traffic came from (the source) and how it got there (the medium). For instance, google / organic tells you the visit was from a Google organic search, while facebook.com / cpc indicates it was from a paid ad on Facebook. This is critical for measuring the ROI of your marketing spend.

Campaigns: Measuring Your Marketing Efforts

You can create custom tracking links (using UTM parameters) for your marketing campaigns. Once you do, Google Analytics can show you exactly how much traffic and how many sales came from a specific email newsletter, social media post, or influencer collaboration.

For example, by using a custom URL in your summer sale email, you can log in to Analytics and see precisely how many people clicked through, what they purchased, and how much revenue that single email generated. This closes the loop on your marketing attribution.

Learn What Visitors Do on Your Site

Once visitors land on your site, what do they do? Do they read your blog? Watch your videos? Bounce in five seconds? The Behavior reports show you how people engage with your content.

Site Content: Popular Pages & Landing Pages

The "All Pages" report shows you which pages on your site get the most traffic. This helps you identify your most popular products, blog posts, or service pages. If one particular blog post is attracting tens of thousands of views per month, you should make sure it has a strong call-to-action to convert that traffic into subscribers or customers.

The "Landing Pages" report is even more powerful. It shows you the first page a visitor sees when they arrive. If your top landing page has a high bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave without interacting), it might signal a problem with the page’s design, content, or load speed.

Site Search: Discover User Intent

If your website has a search bar, Google Analytics can track what visitors are searching for. This is a goldmine of information about user intent.

If users on your e-commerce site are constantly searching for "free shipping" but you don’t offer it, that tells you something important about customer expectations. If users on your blog are searching for a topic you haven’t covered, you now have a new, proven idea for your content calendar.

Events: Tracking Key Interactions

Not all important actions on a website are page loads. "Events" allow you to track specific interactions, such as:

• Clicks on an "Add to Cart" button
• Video plays
• PDF downloads
• Form submissions

Tracking events gives you a much richer understanding of user engagement beyond just which pages they viewed.

Track Your Most Important Business Goals

Ultimately, Google Analytics is about measuring what matters. The Conversions reports help you track the actions that directly contribute to the success of your business.

Goals & Conversions

In Analytics, a "Goal" is a specific action you want users to take. You can set up Goals to track newsletter sign-ups, demo requests, or visits to a "thank you" page after a purchase.

Once Goals are configured, Google Analytics will show you a conversion rate for each of your traffic channels. You might discover that while Facebook brings in a lot of traffic, visitors from Google organic search are three times more likely to convert into a lead. This data helps you decide where to focus your resources for the highest return.

E-commerce Tracking: Connecting Traffic to Revenue

For any online store, this is the most critical feature. Enhanced E-commerce tracking gives you detailed sales data right inside Google Analytics. You can see:

• Total revenue and number of transactions
• Average order value and e-commerce conversion rate
• Which products are selling best
• Which traffic sources, campaigns, or landing pages are generating the most revenue

Armed with this data, you can answer essential questions like, "How much revenue did our last email campaign generate?" or "What’s the overall ROI on our Google Ads spend?" This turns your web analytics from a traffic report into a powerful business intelligence tool.

Putting It All Together: A Simple Example

Let’s imagine you run a small business selling artisanal coffee beans online. By using Google Analytics, you uncover a few key insights:

• Acquisition: Your blog post about "The Best Grind Size for French Press" gets a ton of traffic from organic search (google / organic).
• Behavior: The bounce rate on that landing page is high, and few people are clicking from the blog to your product pages. The content is good, but it’s not driving sales.
• Conversations: You see in your E-commerce report that visitors who do buy French Press beans have a high average order value. They just need a nudge.

The Actionable Decision: Based on these connected data points, you decide to add a prominent, eye-catching call-to-action within that blog post, offering a 10% discount on your French Press coffee blend. A month later, you can check your Analytics to see not only if conversions from that page have increased but also exactly how much revenue your change generated.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics does more than just count visitors, it offers a comprehensive view of your entire customer journey. By learning how to interpret this data, you can move from making guesses to making informed, data-driven decisions that consistently improve your on-site experience and grow your business.

While Google Analytics is a powerful tool on its own, its insights are often just one piece of the puzzle. Answering questions like "Which Facebook ads are actually driving Shopify sales?" requires hours of manually pulling data from different platforms. We built Graphed to solve this exact problem. By connecting all your marketing and sales sources in one place, we enable you to ask questions in plain English — like "create a dashboard showing ROAS by ad campaign" — and get real-time dashboards in seconds, not hours.