Google Analytics

 Google Analytics is a great service for many reasons, most notably, its price tag: $0. Another great advantage for site owners is its ease to set up. In just a few simple steps, site owners can track most (but not all) visitors to their site.

After signing up for an account and adding a small snippet of tracking code to every page, site owners are ready to track a wealth of information about site visits.

But not every visitor can be tracked, and not all types of interaction can be recorded with the basic installation of Google Analytics (GA). The reasons for both of these limitations are caused by the internal workings of GA itself.

With that in mind, I’m hoping that this post will help demystify what’s actually going on in Google Analytics. Specifically, I’m going to focus on how GA collects information from a site’s visitors. With a better understanding of this process, you should be able to recognize situations wherein Google Analytics might not be providing your site with very accurate information.