August 2010
Beginner to intermediate
216 pages
5h 50m
English
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Chapter 3. Under the Covers: How Google Analytics Works
Understanding the Google Analytics architecture—how it collects data, processes data, and creates reports—is the key to understanding many of the advanced topics that we will discuss later in this book. Google Analytics can collect data from a number of different platforms using different tracking technologies, which makes things complicated.
Google Analytics is no longer a simple “hit collector” for websites, but rather an information aggregation system that collects data from standard websites, mobile websites, Adobe Air applications, and iPhone and Android apps. Google has progressively added more data collection methods as technology has driven new and different ways of distributing content to people.
In this book, we will primarily focus on tracking websites, but I will briefly discuss the other tracking methods as well. Let’s start with the simplest configuration: tracking a website.
Data Collection and Processing
Figure 3-1 shows how Google Analytics collects, processes, and displays data.
Google Analytics uses a common data collection technique called page tags. A page tag is a small piece of JavaScript that you must place on all the website pages you want to track. We affectionately call this code the Google Analytics Tracking Code, or GATC for short. If you do not place the code on a page, Google Analytics will not track that page.
The data collection process begins when a visitor requests a page from the web server. The ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.