Where to Use Google Analytics?
Thinking about where you can deploy Google Analytics might seem simple at first glance - on your website, right? While that's the most common answer, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Google Analytics is a surprisingly versatile tool that can give you mission-critical insights across a wide range of digital (and even physical) properties. This article will show you exactly where to use Google Analytics, from your main website and mobile app to third-party platforms and offline conversion points.
The Essential Use Case: Your Website
Let's start with the home base. Your website is the central hub of your digital presence, and installing Google Analytics here is non-negotiable. It's the primary way to understand how people find and interact with your brand online. You simply add a small snippet of JavaScript code (your GA tracking tag) to the header of every page on your site, and it starts collecting data immediately.
Once it's up and running, you can unlock a massive amount of information about your business.
What to Track on Your Website:
Audience Demographics: Learn about your visitors, including their age, gender, location, and interests. This helps ensure your marketing messages are connecting with the right people.
Traffic Acquisition: Discover exactly how users are finding you. The Acquisition reports break down traffic into channels like Organic Search (from Google), Paid Search (from Google Ads), Direct (typing your URL), Referral (links from other sites), and Social (from platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn). This tells you which marketing channels are actually working.
User Behavior: See what people do once they arrive. Which pages are most popular? How long do they stay on your site? Which page do they usually exit from? Tracking metrics like Pageviews, Sessions, and Bounce Rate helps you identify your best content and find areas for improvement.
Top Content: Identify which blog posts, landing pages, and service pages are getting the most traffic. This insight is gold for your content strategy, showing you what topics resonate most with your audience so you can create more of what works.
Conversions and Goals: This is arguably one of the most powerful features. You can set up "Goals" to track specific actions that matter to your business. This could be anything from a user filling out a contact form, signing up for your newsletter, downloading a PDF, or completing a purchase. This report connects your website traffic directly to business outcomes.
Whether you're running a blog, a local service business, or a multi-million dollar e-commerce store, your website is the foundational place to use Google Analytics.
Beyond the Browser: Your Mobile App
If your business has a mobile app, your analytics strategy can't stop at the website. User behavior within an app is fundamentally different from a website, and you need a tool designed to track those unique interactions. That's where Google Analytics for Firebase comes in.
Firebase is Google's platform for building and growing mobile apps, and it includes robust, app-centric analytics at its core. By integrating the Firebase SDK into your iOS or Android app, you get a version of Google Analytics tailor-made for the mobile experience.
What to Track in Your Mobile App:
Users and Sessions: Just like with a website, you can track how many active users you have and how often they open your app.
Screen Views: Instead of "pageviews," you track "screen views" to see which parts of your app users interact with most. This helps you understand which features are popular and which are being ignored.
Events: This is the most powerful feature of Firebase Analytics. You can define custom events for almost any interaction within your app. For a gaming app, you could track level_complete or power_up_used. For a productivity app, you might track task_created or project_shared. This gives you a granular view of how your app is truly being used.
In-App Purchases: If your app includes monetization, you can track in-app purchases and revenue directly, attributing sales back to specific user behaviors or acquisition campaigns.
App Crashes and Performance: Firebase also provides data on app stability. You can see when and where your app is crashing, allowing your development team to identify and fix bugs much faster.
Unifying the Experience: SaaS Platforms and Third-Party Tools
Very few businesses operate solely on their own website. Most use a collection of SaaS tools for key functions like e-commerce, customer support, or email marketing. The good news is that you can often connect these platforms to Google Analytics to get a more holistic view of the customer journey.
Where to Integrate GA in Your Tech Stack:
1. E-commerce Platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.)
Most major e-commerce platforms offer a native integration with Google Analytics. This is a game-changer. Instead of just seeing sales numbers in your Shopify dashboard, Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in GA lets you understand the entire shopping funnel. You can see:
Which marketing campaigns bring in the highest-value customers.
How many users view a product list, then click on a specific product.
The percentage of users who add an item to their cart.
Where customers are abandoning the checkout process.
This allows you to link your Google Ads spend, Facebook marketing efforts, and SEO content directly to product views, add-to-carts, and completed transactions.
2. Help Desks and Knowledge Bases (Zendesk, Intercom, etc.)
Customer support portals are often hosted on subdomains or third-party platforms. Many of these tools allow you to add your Google Analytics tracking ID. Why would you want to do this? To treat your help documentation like its own mini-website. You can analyze:
Most Viewed Articles: Which support articles are users flocking to? This might highlight common product issues or areas of confusion that need to be addressed.
On-site Search: What terms are users searching for inside your knowledge base? This uncovers what users are looking for but can't find, pointing you to gaps in your documentation.
3. Email and Marketing Automation Platforms (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot)
While you can't put a GA tracking script inside an email itself, you can track the traffic that comes from your emails to your website. This is done using UTM parameters - special tags you add to the end of your links.
A link might look something like this:
https://www.yourwebsite.com?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=august_promo
When someone clicks that link, Google Analytics reads those tags and correctly attributes their session (and any subsequent conversions) to your August newsletter campaign. This is essential for proving the ROI of your email marketing efforts.
Connecting the Dots: Offline and Advanced Use Cases
Sometimes, the most important conversions don't happen in a web browser. They happen in a physical store or deep within your CRM. Google Analytics has a powerful (and slightly more advanced) tool for this called the Measurement Protocol.
In simple terms, the Measurement Protocol allows you to send data to Google Analytics from any internet-connected device - not just a website or mobile app. This opens up some incredible possibilities for bridging the online-offline gap.
Examples of Advanced Tracking:
1. Point-of-Sale (POS) Systems
Imagine you run a retail store and use an online marketing campaign to drive foot traffic. With the Measurement Protocol, your POS system can be configured to send a "hit" to Google Analytics whenever a transaction occurs in-store. This allows you to measure how an online ad campaign influenced offline sales, providing a true omnichannel view of your marketing performance.
2. CRM Systems (Salesforce, HubSpot)
For B2B companies, a "conversion" isn't an online purchase, it's a signed contract in a CRM. The journey from a first website visit to a closed deal can take months and involve multiple touchpoints. By using the Measurement Protocol, you can send an event to GA from your CRM when a deal is closed. This finally allows your marketing team to attribute real revenue back to the original source that generated the lead - whether it was an organic search, a paid ad, or a blog post.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, the question isn't just "should I use Google Analytics?" but rather "where can't I use it?" From your primary domain to your app, support platforms, and even offline sales systems, Google Analytics provides the framework for measuring nearly every customer interaction. By placing it not just on your website but across your broader digital ecosystem, you can move from segmented data to a truly unified view of your business.
Of course, tracking data everywhere is one thing, making sense of it is another. The real challenge often comes from stitching together insights from Google Analytics with data from your other crucial platforms like Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Salesforce. Here at Graphed, we focus on eliminating that friction. You can connect all your data sources in seconds, then use simple, natural language to ask questions like, "Show me which Facebook campaigns drove the most Shopify revenue this month." We help you get straight to the answers you need without spending hours wrestling with spreadsheets and manual reports. By putting all your data in one place, Graphed turns analytics from a chore into a conversation.