What is Google Analytics – ivantage explains

Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics service hosted by Google and usable, free of charge, by means of a standard web browser. It is highly scalable and so used by a wide range of clients to analyse traffic on many websites, from small to very large. It helps website owners understand:

1) how visitors found the tracked website

2) what visitors are doing on the site, but

3) like other web analytics packages, it does not tell you why visitors are behaving as they do.

Get Google Analytics from the official web site

Google Analytics (GA) was born on November 14th 2005. Its arrival into the world came as a direct result of Google’s acquisition of the Urchin Software Corporation on 28 March 2005. Up until this point, Urchin Software Corporation had two successful Web analytics products – Urchin Software version 5 and Urchin Software on Demand, a hosted or SaaS web analytics package.

Google Analytics revolutionised the web analytics industry, as it was provided free of charge by Google (up to 5 million page views per account per month) to anyone who wanted it.

There have been six releases or significant improvements to Google Analytics. They are:

1) v1 – Democratising web analytics, 14 November 2005

2) v2 – New user interface incorporating technology form Measure Map, another Google acquisition – Tuesday, 8 May 2007

3) v3 – New ga.js JavaScript library to support Event Tracking, Site Search – Tuesday, 16 October 2007

4) v4 – Enterprise-class feature launch – Wednesday, 22 October 2008

5) v5 – Powerful, Flexible and Intelligent launch - Tuesday, 20 October 2009

6) v6 – Easier, faster Analytics - Thursday, 17 March 2011.

How Google Analytics works

Google Analytics relies on every page of the tracked website being tagged with a JavaScript tag called the Google Analytics Tracking Code or GATC. As the GATC is executed from the tracked website’s domain it sends first party cookies named the utma, utmb, utmc, utmz and (if custom variables are used) utmv to the visitor’s browser.

The GATC also requests a 1 x 1 pixel gif file from Google’s servers which is rendered (but not visible) on the website’s page. As the pixel is requested from the Google Servers, the request passes data about the visitor’s visit to Google Analytics including information continued in the utm cookies.

This data is collected, formatted and stored at Google's central data repository. At any later time, the Google Analytics reporting system may be used to query the stored data to produce any number and type of report. All reports are visible online via a standard web browser.