What Is Google Analytics?
A free tool that reports on what happens on your website after somebody arrives. The name now refers to one current product. Most of the confusion people bring to it comes from guidance written for the version that was retired.
It Means One Thing Now
If instructions you have read do not match what you are looking at, you are almost certainly reading about the previous version. Google Analytics now means a single current product. The one before it was retired. An enormous quantity of published guidance still describes it as though it were live.
Why this causes so much trouble. The interfaces differ.
Screens are laid out differently, several familiar reports do not exist under the same names and figures people knew are calculated in another way. Somebody following old instructions concludes their setup is broken.
What the version numbering means. Nothing you need.
You will see the current product referred to with a four after its name. That is simply which generation it is. Since only one exists now, the distinction matters mainly for dating what you read.
How to spot stale guidance quickly. Two tells.
Anything describing bounce rate as a central measure. Anything telling you to look at reports about audiences and behaviour as separate sections. Both were written for the retired product.
Why we lead with this. It saves an afternoon.
A business convinced its analytics is misconfigured, when it is actually reading instructions for something that no longer exists, is the commonest reason anybody arrives at a page like this one.
What this page covers. The whole picture.
What it does, what it costs, what happened to the old one, why the numbers changed and the things it cannot tell you at all.
What It Actually Does
It reports on what happens on your website once somebody has arrived. That is the whole scope. Holding it clearly in mind prevents most of the questions businesses ask that this tool was never going to answer.
What it records. Behaviour on your pages.
How many people arrived, which pages they looked at, roughly where they came from, what devices they used and whether they did anything you have told it to watch for.
Where its knowledge begins. The moment of arrival.
Not before. Everything that happened in a search result, including how many people saw your site and chose somebody else, is invisible to it.
Where that other half lives. Search reporting.
Google Search Console covers what happened before the click. Our comparison of the two tools sets out the division properly and this page will not repeat it.
When it starts counting. The day you install it.
There is no history before installation and none can be recovered afterwards. A business installing it today has no data for last year, which is worth knowing before anybody promises you a year on year comparison.
Whose site it reports on. Only yours.
Properties you control and nothing else. Competitor figures are not available here in any form, whatever a sales call may have implied.
Is It Free
Yes, for the version almost every business needs. There is a paid tier and it exists for organisations at a scale most readers will never approach, so the practical answer for a UK trade, shop or professional practice is that this costs nothing.
What the free version includes. Effectively everything.
The reporting, the setup, the connections to other Google tools and the ability to define what counts as a result for your business. Nothing on this cluster describes a paid feature.
What the paid tier is actually for. Volume and contracts.
Very large organisations hitting data limits, wanting guaranteed service commitments or needing contractual arrangements the free version does not provide. It is bought by enterprises rather than by businesses.
What you might still pay for. The work.
Somebody setting it up properly, deciding what should be measured and reading it every month is a legitimate cost. The tool is free and the thinking is not.
The thing to be wary of. Being charged for the tool.
If a supplier is invoicing you for the analytics itself rather than for time spent on it, that is worth a question. We have seen it on more than one inherited account.
Why the question gets asked so much. It seems unlikely.
A tool this substantial being free is genuinely surprising. It is free because your data contributes to a much larger commercial picture, which is a fair exchange to understand rather than to worry about.
The Previous Version
The product everybody used before this one was retired in two stages. Both are now well in the past. It stopped processing new data on 1 July 2023. From the week of 1 July 2024 the old properties could no longer be opened at all, including with read only access. The stored data was deleted.
What that means in practice. The history is gone.
Unless somebody exported it beforehand, years of a business's own data no longer exist anywhere. That is not recoverable and no supplier can retrieve it.
Who this hurt most. Long established businesses.
A company with a decade of records lost the ability to compare against any of it. Newer businesses were largely unaffected, since they had little to lose.
Why we are stating dates. Both have passed.
Plenty of guidance still frames this as an approaching deadline with advice to export before it is too late. That advice is now several years stale and following it wastes time on something that cannot be done.
What was not a redesign. The measurement itself.
This is the part people miss. The replacement was not the same tool with a new appearance. It counts differently, which block five covers.
What you cannot do with the two. Compare periods.
Figures from the old product and the current one are not comparable across a date line, so any chart placing them side by side is describing two different measurements.
The Measurement Model Changed
The old product was built around pages being loaded and visits being counted. The current one records everything as an event, meaning anything that happens gets logged the same way whether it is a page opening, a video playing or a form being sent.
Why that was done. Websites stopped being pages.
Modern sites let people do a great deal without loading anything new, so counting page loads had become a poor description of activity. Counting events describes both kinds of site equally.
What it changed for you. Familiar figures moved.
Businesses migrating saw several numbers shift noticeably with nothing on the website having changed. That was the measurement being redefined rather than performance falling.
The measure that changed most visibly. Bounce rate.
It is now derived from an engagement measure rather than calculated as before, which is why older benchmarks for it describe a different sum entirely. That has its own guide in this series.
What a conversion is called now. A key event.
What the tool treats as a result was renamed in March 2024. It is the same idea, being an event you have marked as mattering. The word changed rather than the concept.
Why this matters commercially. Comparisons break.
Any report crossing the migration is comparing two different definitions. So is any benchmark quoted from before it. That is worth knowing before anybody presents you with a decline.
What It Cannot Tell You
Four things this tool does not know. Businesses regularly assume otherwise. Knowing the limits early prevents the disappointment of looking for something that was never in there.
Anything about competitors. Nothing at all.
Not their traffic, not their sources and not their performance. It reports on properties you own. Anybody offering competitor data is selling estimates from elsewhere.
What happened in the search results. A different tool.
How many people saw your site and passed over it is a search reporting question. Everything in our Search Console series covers that half.
Whether somebody rang you. The largest gap.
A click on a telephone number can be recorded. An actual call cannot. Neither can somebody reading the number and dialling it. For most local businesses that is where the outcome happens. Our material on measuring performance owns that problem.
Everything that happened. It records a portion.
Consent choices and blocking mean some visits are never counted. That is normal rather than a fault. This cluster never puts a figure on the shortfall, because it varies enormously.
What follows from all that. Treat it as indicative.
It is the best view you have of your own website and it is not an audited ledger. Decisions should survive the numbers being approximately right rather than exactly right.
Where To Go Next
Three routes depending on where you are. The order matters. Installing it badly is considerably worse than not having it, since it produces confident figures nobody should trust.
If you have not got it yet. Setup first.
Several decisions made in the first ten minutes are awkward to undo eighteen months later. Setting it up properly covers those.
If it is installed and untouched. Start looking.
This is the commonest position by a distance. Using it covers a working rhythm and which figures mislead.
If you already read it monthly. Check what you measure.
A property recording only visits cannot tell you whether any of the work was worth doing. Defining what counts as a result is the single most valuable configuration in the tool.
What to do about the missing history. Start now.
If the old data is gone, the useful response is making sure this year is exported and kept. The whole series sits on the Google Analytics guide.
One thing to settle early. Whose account it is.
It should be in the business name with any agency added as a user. That question is easier to answer at the start than during a handover.
Most of what
you have read
describes a
retired product.
The previous version stopped collecting in July 2023 and its data was deleted a year later. An enormous amount of published guidance still describes it as though it were live, which is why so many businesses conclude their setup is broken when it is working exactly as intended.
What we check on an inherited account:
If your old data was deleted before anybody exported it, we will tell you that rather than sell you a recovery.
Every guide.
One tool.
Getting it installed and configured properly, reading the reports without being misled, measuring outcomes rather than activity, the advanced reporting and what to do when the numbers look wrong.
