Google Analytics is a web analytics service from Google that tracks and reports website and mobile app traffic, now delivered as Google Analytics 4 (GA4) within the Google Marketing Platform. It enables businesses to understand where users come from, how they engage with content, and which paths lead to conversions, supporting both simple dashboards and advanced, exploratory analysis. en.wikipedia.org
Launched in November 2005 after Google’s acquisition of Urchin, Google Analytics has evolved through multiple generations—Classic, Universal Analytics, and now GA4. GA4 replaces the older session‑based model with an event‑based data model designed for cross‑platform measurement, privacy-centric data collection, and machine‑learning powered insights such as predictive metrics and anomaly detection. en.wikipedia.org
The product is offered in a free standard edition used by millions of websites and a paid enterprise edition, Google Analytics 360, which adds higher data limits, unsampled reporting, advanced attribution, and deeper native integrations across Google Marketing Platform (Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Search Ads 360) and enterprise systems like Salesforce. GA4 also offers native export of raw event data into Google BigQuery, enabling organizations to treat Analytics as a core data source for broader BI, modeling, and attribution workflows. seoengine.ai
Google Analytics is by far the most widely adopted web analytics tool: as of 2023 GA4 alone is used by roughly 13.5 million websites, and Google Analytics overall powers the majority of the top sites on the web. This ubiquity, combined with extensive documentation, partner ecosystem, and integration with Google Ads and other media platforms, has made Google Analytics a de‑facto standard for digital measurement and marketing attribution globally. en.wikipedia.org