How important is Google Analytics?

Analytics are definitely useful most of the times. I think "basic" analytics is not enough here. As @hassanprocesslogic said, conversions + events are something you want to have to check how many users are actually converting and how they are actually using your page.
I'm working on splitbee.io, it combines Google Analytics & Mixpanel & Optimizely.

So you have basic analytics like you have with fathom, but you can still go deeper using custom events & using the user explorer. Build funnels to measure the drop off rate of defined user flows or even do A/B testing to test what copy is converting better!

While we are still deciding between which Analytics platform we prefer, I think the two kinds of analytics features you should look at are (at the start): conversions and events.

Conversions help you figure out which growth tactics are working. E.g. is your blog post helping lead to more people buying your product? Or is it your Twitter account? This then helps you double down on the medium that is leading to higher conversions.

Events are more so for interactions within your application. You don't need a third party analytics service for this if you don't want to, but just being able to measure user behaviour in terms of conversions is really useful (conversions don't need to be a "sign up").

Analytics platforms also make it a breeze to help A/B split testing so you can figure out what changes work and which don't (e.g. trying out different pricing or landing pages).

Just my two cents on how we're using them.

The key metric you are missing in your perception of analytics is conversions. It helps guide you to how to improve your conversion rate or to maximize your marketing effort on what converts well.

Have thousands of people coming to your site from an external source, ads, seo, etc. but they aren't converting well, that is a huge opportunity to improve that and profoundly change your business.

Have something that converts really well, but has no traffic. That is a huge opportunity to push more traffic through your funnel and change your business forever.

By analyzing pricing trends over time, we were able to increase one of my clients income by 20k/mon overnight because we could see that we could up the pricing of their product via the analytics data we had.

It's all going to depend on your business how you use it, but it is way more impactful that just a couple nice to have metrics.

If you think analytics just give you simple metrics like "bounce rates, page views etc" then I encourage you to learn more about what it can really do for you.

Analytics tools (including GA) can help you:

• Find product-market fit (by letting you analyze usage data to find what features work best for high-paying customers),
• Scale (by letting you understand user acquisition by marketing channel, to know what campaigns work), and
• Optimize your business (by letting you take those user acquisition campaigns and make them more profitable)

If you're in the earlier part of that process, you may want my book, Analytics for Indies.

The goal for the book is to take you from "not sure what to do" to "done" in a couple hours, with future-friendly analytics data capture all set up.

The book tells you:
-which tools to use, and why
-what data to capture, and how to report on it, in prioritized order

Why me? I've spent the last 8 years in the analytics industry, building scalable, billion-dollar analytics for PlayStation, Rakuten, and a chunk of the Fortune 500.

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Unless you actually implement events in GA and use it for funnel analysis, one of the best use cases is to measure how your content is doing. For example what blog posts are working or not.

You need to measure both, and probably need different tools to do so.

Google Analytics, Fathom Analytics, Clicky, Simple Analytics etc. are all great to see where your visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay on the page etc. Useful metrics to see which campaigns are working for you and what pages people enter and exit your site or app.

Then you need some sort of screen heatmap or activity measuring, such as Crazy Egg, Inspectlet, Full Story etc. to see how users are interacting with your site. Which bits catch their eye. What sections they stop and look at. Which portions they just flick by. You will learn a lot about user behaviour and perceptions from this. Also interesting to see the difference in behaviours for desktop and mobile users.

Hi Rahul,

I think it's extremely important. When you talk about your product performance key metrics may change over time. You focus now on active users or rolling users as DAU or MAU but over in 3 months you might realise that user flow is something critical for you, or some specific channel data might bring insides. Even though you don't need it at the moment, starting collecting data from the very first days can make your life easier, you will have more number to work with.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, of course they are others but for now it's must-have instrument. Later you can combine its data with different sources in data studio, add more actions tracking, custom data layers, but start collecting data now. And check other metrics thinking which possible insights they can provide you.

Having analytics is a MUST for building a new product, otherwise you have no idea if what you're doing is even being seen!

I personally use and pay for Fathom Analytics (this is my affiliate link btw). It has less features than Google Analytics but it's more privacy focused and simple.

This is what I have for my book landing page: