Original subtitles

In this video you're going to learn how Google Analytics works so you can understand how Google Analytics

collects data about your Web site visitors and how other Web sites collect data anonymously about you.

So to collect data about your Web site visitors and the interactions they have on your site.

What you were going to do is add a small piece of tracking code to your Web site and the tracking code

looks like this.

And once it's set up Google Analytics will drop a cookie into the user's browser for your Web site and

it will help track every interaction that the user performs on your site.

Now if you live in Europe you might be familiar with seeing notifications about cookies letting you

know that the Web site is collecting information on about you.

And the reason that you'll see this in Europe is because there are more privacy restrictions and they

really have to tell you that they're collecting information on you.

And as you can see here I visited this site and it's saying we're using cookies for analytics but also

for advertising.

So retargeting and to improve their Web sites.

So there is letting me know that they're collecting this information.

And so this is the type of cookie that Google Analytics will use to collect that analytics information.

And the amazing thing is is that just this small piece of code that's put on every page of your Web

site plus this browser cookie will actually collect a huge amount of information about you such as the

pages that you visit.

And with this information Google analytics can calculate the most popular page and also determine if

for example a user reaches the purchase confirmation page.

Now Google Analytics will also collect information like the language that the browsers set to the type

of browsers such as chrome or Safari.

The device an operating system that I'm using and my location age and gender.

And it can even collect the traffic source which brought me to this Web site in the first place and

that could be a search engine or an advertisement or an email marketing campaign that I clicked on.

So I think it's interesting to look a little a little bit more detail about what these cookies are because

we hear about them all the time.

We see these notifications for what really are they and what really is the way that Google Analytics

is collecting information on us.

So we know that now these cookies are files created by the Web site that you visit and they collect

all that information.

But why do we allow this.

Why do we agree to these notifications.

Well they really make your online experience a lot easier by saving your browser information with cookies.

Sites keep you signed in such as say Facebook you don't need to reload again every time because it recognizes

you.

And it will remember your site preferences and give you locally relevant contents.

But Walter these cookies actually look like.

Well what you can do is actually come into your browser and I'm doing this in Chrome but the process

is going to be very similar in any browser that you use.

You can come into your settings have a look for cookies on the settings related to those and you can

actually see the cookies that other sites have created and are collecting information anonymously about

you.

So I can see that there are cookies here.

Forgot Google Analytics also here for say Facebook and lots of other sites that I have visited.

So it's really these small pieces of code and text files that are collecting all of that information

that is then filtering on back to Google Analytics.

One important thing to note is that Google Analytics collects this data anonymously so they won't say

that this visit came from da Walsh in Dublin at this time.

What they'll do is with that prize or cookie create a random I.D. to distinguish between different users

whether they're new or returning on what they also do with that I.D. tie all of the activity like the

pages that you visited et cetera up into a single visit known as a session.

So here you can see in Google on makes that over the last seven days there have been 14 times in sessions

by 11000 users meaning that a number of these users have come back for another session on the Web site

and that is really how they're able to create these fantastic reports while respecting the privacy of

the Web site visitors.

So to recap in this video you've learned how Google Analytics collects data about your Web site visitors

and you also got an insight into how Web sites collect anonymous data about you.