Yes, it's very easy. You just drop a small javascript snippet and initialize the SDK. Make sure you identify users with their user_id if signed in. I also recommend taking a look at Amplitude for deeper insights on stuff like retention and specific feature engagement. We use GA more for top of funnel and acquisition, whereas Amplitude for deeper product analytics.
If you start adding custom events, I recommend creating a custom “AnalyticsService” so that you’re sendEvent() will then call the respective sendEvent() of each SDK, GA, Amplitude, Intercom, etc. You can also look at Segment for routing this, but its a little overpriced for just routing the data.
Guy Shahine
@ng2453 Dropping the Google Analytics script gives you generic data by default like: Page visits, Page Visit Length, bounces, session length, unique users, rough demographic, location, etc.
Gotchas:
If your app is a single page app, meaning navigation is handled by javascript then only the initially loaded page that the user navigates to is counted as visited.
Unique users vs Returned users are computed based on browser, ip address, cookie,..etc so if same user logins in from phone and browser then it's counted as two different users. You need to explicitly send the user ID at login and google analytics will persist it
You can start there and then track more specific things you're optimizing for.
So once you signal the user ID, you can also attach user properties (think paid vs free).
If your app is a single page app (doesn't reload on navigation clicks) then you can track each screen view using the API.
If you'd like to track clicks then you apply a quick hack where you listen to all clicks and you report the link text (id or class, depends on your code), as an event
From here you can start planting code to track specific scenarios that you're trying to optimize for
Once the data is in GA then you can create your views, funnels, conversion flags, and other magic
Google is investing more in analytics and with acquisition of Fabric, Crashlytics and Firebase more integrations and cool features are coming together it's not their yet.
Based on your scenarios there are plenty of analytics companies out there such as Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Chartbeat, crazyegg https://www.slant.co/options/1405/alternatives/~mixpanel-alternatives