Now that we have some Idea as to how google analytics works,
lets dive deeper into its concepts. Lets today understand how exactly google
analytics calculates Visits/ Visitors with help of some knowledge about cookies.
Now, as defined earlier Visit is calculated whenever someone
visits your website, but the calculation of the same is not as straightforward
as it seems.
Visits are primarily
based on Cookies which Google Analytics uses to analyze or track the User
activity on the website. Now let us understand something about cookies and their
types.
Cookies are primarily
text files stored on your computer whenever
you visit a particular website. To give you a rough idea, have you noticed
whenever you are about to enter your username on Facebook or gmail on your
laptop, your username appears like a drop down? How did the website find your
username? Actually, it finds it using cookies tracking your earlier visits.
Note: It will only be able to do so if you have earlier visited, the website from
your computer and you have not cleared browsing history or deleted cookies.
Cookies are non malicious and cannot harm your computer, also they do not store
any of your personal data.
Now there are basically two types of Cookies: First Party
Cookies and Third Party cookies.
a.)
First
Party Cookies: This cookies are stored by the website you are visiting under
the website domain name. For e.g If you are visiting blogger.com you will find
a cookie with domain as www.blogger.com.
First party cookies are mostly used for Visitor tracking since they are usually
a prerequisite for most of the websites. The information stored by first party
cookies can only be accessed by the website storing it in the first place. So
there are no potential threats from first party cookies and are quite safe.
b.)
Third Party
Cookies: This cookies are created by a website which was not directly
visited by you. They may be set by any advertisement getting displayed whenever
you visit any page. These cookies generally can be accessed by even other websites
other than the website which created it. Generally, all the browsers now days
have the option of not allowing third party cookies to get created on the
system.
Apart from this classification cookies are also classified into
two types: temporary and permanent:
a.)
Temporary Cookies: Temporary cookies are created while you are navigating
through a website. For e.g. You are shopping at Amazon.com, initially you
choose a wireless mouse which is for 22$. Now suddenly you see that shipping is
free for orders above 35$. Now you add this wireless mouse to your shopping
cart and again purchase some other item where in your total shopping exceeds
35$. Now this information, i.e. the wireless mouse, you added to your cart
while you were searching for the next item (to exceed 35$) gets stored in a
temporary cookie. This cookie gets deleted immediately when you exit your
browser.
b.)
Permanent Cookies: Permanent cookies are usually
stored on your computer until you explicitly delete them or uninstall your
browser.Permanent cookies usually store information such as user session, user
id , browser details, etc. These cookies are primarily responsible for your
username or any other details popping up whenever you visit a website you have
previously visited. These cookies are used to identify the user which is
visiting your website and thus be useful to track unique visitors in Google
Analytics.
Reference :
cookie-usage. (2014, October 3). Retrieved from https://developers.google.com:
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage
Kaushik, A. (2008, July 24). web-analytics-visitor-tracking-cookies.
Retrieved from www.kaushik.net:
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-visitor-tracking-cookies/
Kaushik, A. (n.p, n.p. n.p.). privacy-policy.
Retrieved from www.kaushik.net: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/privacy-policy/
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