digital environments.

Most organisations use Google Analytics to get a better understanding of how their customers

find and interact with websites and mobile apps,

but Analytics can be used to measure behaviour on other devices like game consoles, ticket

kiosks and even appliances.

You can even use Google Analytics in really creative ways to collect "offline" business

data, like purchases that happen in your retail shops,

as long as you have an accurate way of collecting and sending that data to your Analytics account.

In this lesson, we're going to give you an overview of how Google Analytics works to

collect data from various environments.

We'll define the different parts of the Analytics platform,

and talk about how the data gets from the tracking code into your reports.

This lesson will provide the foundation you need to understand the tools you'll eventually

use to set up Google Analytics.

When we talk about the platform, we're referring to the technology that makes Google Analytics

work, and not just the data and tools you see in your account.

There are four main parts of the Google Analytics platform: collection, configuration, processing

and reporting.

All four parts work together to help you gather, customise and analyse your data.

Let's take a look at collection first. Collection is all about getting data into your Google

Analytics account.

To collect data, you need to add Google Analytics code to your website, mobile app or other

digital environment you want to measure.

This tracking code provides a set of instructions to Google Analytics,

telling it which user interactions it should pay attention to and which data it should

collect.

The way the data is collected depends on the environment you want to track.

For example, you'll use the JavaScript tracking code to collect data from a website,

but a Software Development Kit, called an SDK, to collect data from a mobile app.

Each time the tracking code is triggered by a user's behaviour,

like when the user loads a page on a website or a screen in a mobile app, Google Analytics

records that activity.

First, the tracking code collects information about each activity, like the title of the page

viewed.

Then this data is packaged up in what we call a "hit".

Once the hit has been created it is sent to Google's servers for the next step -- data

processing.

During data processing, Google Analytics transforms the raw data from collection using the settings

in your Google Analytics account.

These settings, also known as the configuration, help you align the data more closely with

your measurement plan and business objectives.

For example, you could set up something called a Filter that tells Google Analytics to remove

any data from your own employees.

During processing Google Analytics would then filter out all of the hits from your employees,

so that this data wouldn't be used for your report calculations.

You can also configure Google Analytics to import data directly into your reports from

other Google products, like Google AdWords, Google AdSense and Google Webmaster Tools.

You can even configure Google Analytics to import data from non-Google sources, like

your own internal data.

It's during the processing stage that Google Analytics then merges all of these data sources

to create the reports you eventually see in your account.

It's important to note that once your data has been processed, it can not be changed.

For example, if you set a filter to exclude data from your employees,

that data will be permanently removed from your reports and can't be recovered at a later

date.

After Google Analytics has finished processing, you can access and analyse your data using

the reporting interface,

which includes easy-to-use reporting tools and data visualisations.

It's also possible to systematically access your data using the Google

Analytics Core Reporting API.

Using the API you can build your own reporting tools or extract your data directly into third-party

reporting tools.

Throughout the rest of this course, we will dive deeper into key topics about collection,

configuration, processing and reporting.

Having a comprehensive understanding of each of these platform components will help you

better understand the data you see in Google Analytics.

It will also prepare you for more advanced topics about how you can customise your data.