Google Analytics Interview Questions

1. What is Google Analytics?

Ans:

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. It provides statistics and basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing purposes. The service is available to anyone with a Google account.

2. When and How Google started Google Analytics service?

Ans:

Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin. Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet.Google continued to sell the standalone, installable Urchin WebAnalytics Software through a network of value-added resellers until discontinuation on March 28, 2012. The Google-branded version was rolled out in November 2005 to anyone who wished to sign up.The newer version of Google Analytics tracking code is known as the asynchronous tracking code, which Google claims is significantly more sensitive and accurate, and is able to track even very short activities on the website.

In March 2016, Google released Google Analytics 360, which is a software suite that provides analytics on return on investment and other marketing indicators.

In October 2017 the newest version of Google Analytics was announced, called Global Site Tag. Its purpose was to unify the tagging system to simplify implementation.

3. What is current state of Google Analytics within Google services?

Ans:

In June 2018, Google introduced Google Marketing Platform, an online advertisement and analytics brand.Google Marketing Platform brings together DoubleClick Digital Marketing and the Google Analytics 360 Suite to help you plan, buy, measure and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place. Google Marketing Platform helps you deliver more relevant and effective marketing, while ensuring that you respect your customers’ privacy and give them control over their data.

4. What are features of Google Analytics?

Ans:

Google Analytics features include:

• Data visualization tools including a dashboard, scorecards and motion charts, which display changes in data over time.

• Segmentation for analysis of subsets, such as conversions.

• Custom reports.

• Email-based sharing and communication.

• Integration with other Google products, such as AdWords, Public Data Explorer and Website Optimizer.

5. Why Google Analytics is critical for business?

Ans:

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help you analyze your website traffic.

Even though “web analytics” sounds like a very small area of your digital presence, the implications of Google Analytics are in fact huge.

This is because for most companies, your website serves as a hub for all of your digital traffic. If you are running any marketing activities such as search ads or social media ads, your users are most likely going to visit your website somewhere along their user journey.

Given that your website is the central hub of your digital presence; your website is the best way to give you a holistic view of the effectiveness of all the campaigns you are running to promote your product/services online. Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track your digital marketing effectiveness.

That’s why over 50 million websites around the world uses Google Analytics. If you are not using it, you should set it up right now.

6. How Google Analytics works?

Ans:

Simply put, Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. The code records various activities of your users when they visit your website, along with the attributes (such as age, gender, interests) of those users. It then sends all that information to the GA (Google Analytics) server once the user exits your website.

Next, Google Analytics aggregates the data collected from your website in multiple ways, primarily by four levels:

• User level (related to actions by each user)
• Session level (each individual visit)
• Pageview level (each individual page visited)
• Event level (button clicks, video views, etc)

7. What are the differences between Metrics and Dimensions in Google Analytics?

Ans:

The way I think about the differences between metrics and dimensions is that metrics are actual statistics Google collected about user behavior on your website, and dimensions are the various ways you can view those numbers based on the business questions you’re trying to answer.

For example, just knowing the total amount of people visiting your website is not very helpful to your business. Knowing how many people visit your website by age or location, on the other hand, is very helpful to figure out who your core audiences are on the internet. You may learn, for instance, that 80% of your visitors are women between 25–35 in east coast cities (NYC, DC, Boston) — that’s extremely useful and actionable information about who you should be targeting with your digital marketing.

8. What kind of data available on Google Analytics and what you can do with them?

Ans:

There are two types of data that you can collect in Google Analytics:

User Acquisition Data: data about your users before they visit your website

User Behavior Data: data about your users when they visit your website

(1) User Acquisition Data

Before users visit your website: you can access data about your user demographics before they visit your website (e.g. their age, gender, and interests). You can also get data about where they are coming from, whether that’s Facebook, other websites, or Google search. I call these data “user acquisition data” because they can help you figure out which user group and channels to target.

(2) User Behavior Data

The second group of data are “user behavior” data, which are collected during a user’s session on your website. “User behavior” data include:

how long a user stayed on your website

what is their first and last page on your website

the most common “pathway” through which they go through your website

9. How much does it costs to use Google Analytics?

Ans:

Google Analytics standard version is free of charge. The only “cost” is your data shared with Google.

Google Analytics 360 (previously Google Analytics Premium) hasn’t announced pricing for its product yet. It used to be $150k a year for Premium, but now, GA 360 offers the whole stack with Tag Manager, DouleClick and other Google products.

Freemium version will be great if your website doesn’t reach 10k sessions per month. If you hit that limit, you will experience sampling issues which may skew your reports. If your reports are based on 90% of traffic, the problem is not huge and you can still rely on your data. But if they are based on less than 50%, your analytics may be mission the point.

10. What can you track with Google Analytics?

Ans:

Google Analytics tracks all of its data by a unique tracking code that you install on every page of your website. This code is a small snippet of Javascript, or a coding language that runs in viewers’ browser when they visit those pages.

11. What does Bounce Rate means in Google Analytics?

Ans:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits (or web sessions). It is the percentage of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Google analytics calculates and report the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website.

12. What is Google Analytics SEO?

Ans:

Optimize Your Website For SEO Using Google Analytics. Search Engine Optimization. For many of us, these three words hang over our heads daily. They are the words that confound and confuse, and for many marketers and business owners, beginning to optimize SEO is one of the last things you decide to take care of.

13. How do you implement Google Analytics? How to use Google Analytics on your website?

Ans:

Create or sign in to your Analytics account:

Go to google.com/analytics

Do one of the following:

To create an account, click Start for free.

·        To sign in to your account, Click Sign in to Analytics.

·        Set up a property in your Analytics account. A property represents your website or app, and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.

·        Set up a reporting view in your property. Views let you create filtered perspectives of your data; for example, all data except from your company’s internal IP addresses, or all data associated with a specific sales region.

·        Follow the instructions to add the tracking code to your website or mobile app so you can collect data in your Analytics property.

14. What does a session mean in Google Analytics?

Ans:

A session is defined as a group of interactions one user takes within a given time frame on your website. Google Analytics defaults that time frame to 30 minutes. Meaning whatever a user does on your website (e.g. browses pages, downloads resources, and purchases products) before they leave equals one session.

15. What are limitations of Google Analytics?

Ans:

Google Analytics for Mobile Package allows Google Analytics to be applied to mobile websites.

The Mobile Package contains server-side tracking codes that use PHP, JavaServer Pages, ASP.NET, or Perl for its server-side language.[30] However, many ad filtering programs and extensions (such as Firefox's Adblock, and NoScript) and the mobile phone app Disconnect Mobile can block the Google Analytics Tracking Code. This prevents some traffic and users from being tracked and leads to holes in the collected data. 

Also, privacy networks like Tor will mask the user's actual location and present inaccurate geographical data. Some users do not have JavaScript-enabled/capable browsers or turn this feature off. However, these limitations are considered small—affecting only a small percentage of visits.