Mr. Sam is a Product Manager who is part of a big commercial team. He takes care of building new and robust application for a Healthcare company. Company is investing heavily into digital transformation and making CRM platform very efficient. But Mr. Sam is confused on which feature to prioritize, where to invest, as they have already built lots of application for their sales process. He does not know whether those features are being used or not, what is their performance, which all the regions are using it, what is the page load time, what is user interaction flow, how to trace if the feature is being used correctly, etc.
Mr. Sam was looking for an analytics tool and he came across “Google Analytics”
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is an analytical tool that gives you an extremely in-depth look at your website and/or app performance. It allows you to track a vast range of data concerning your site performance, traffic, and user behavior.
What Exactly Does Google Analytics Do?
This is an amazing tool that has many functions, but basically, it gives you a quick and easy way of finding out all the vital metrics regarding your application, these include Realtime Data, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, etc. Other things you can find out using Google Analytics include:
Your Source/Medium metrics (for example, from where all this traffic coming from)
Your page load times, Server response time.
Time spent vs Avg time spent on application
Usage of features per regions, per Country, per City, etc.
User behavior flow.
Where your visitors go after they leave your site.
You can do the trend analysis weekly, monthly even yearly.
It can also help you to streamline your website’s design and coding to improve load times.
The information captured by Google Analytics is conveniently made available in different reports that you can find within the user interface. You can then analyze these reports to better understand your customers.
Real-time Reports – Provide useful information about the number of active users, as well as the most active pages, or the top features being used in real time.
Audience Reports – These provide you with data concerning your site visitors. You can see the number of sessions on your site over a certain period of time, as well as their country, city, language, and even the browser or operating system that they are using.
Acquisition Reports – These show you the means by which your site visitors got to your site (whether the traffic was direct, organic, referral, or from social media).
Behavior Reports – With these, you’ll be able to see the different ways your visitors interact with your site. This helps you in determining which of your application/feature is performing well.
Architecture Diagram
What is Google Tag Manager (GTM)?
Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you manage and deploy analytics tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website (or mobile app) without having to modify the code.
Conclusion
Google analytics with GTM is an excellent free tool which helps anyone who is looking to track users and its behavior for an application to a very detail level.
There are certain limitations which we have observed when we use it in Salesforce. Google Analytics work only in custom visualforce pages where we have a capability to add JavaScript code snippet.