I am installing Google Optimize for my client BUT they ask me how google optimize collects the data from the web. If I understood correctly, Google Optimize does not save any data. Instead, it uses data collected from Google Analytics. Is this correct?
If so, my client does not want Google Optimize to access the user IP address. I tried to create a view on google analytics but I don't know how to exclude the IP address field with a filter. Can I prevent Google analytics from passing IP address to Google Optimize?
Google Analytics does not show the IP address in the reports, you can still use the anonymizeIp parameter in order to obfuscate the last part of the IP and thus make it anonymous to the Google Analytics servers (documentation).
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As I understood, using Google Analytics, I can create a tracking code that I can embed into any application of website. However, is it receive a specific URL that is used for tracking the whole application in order for me to whitelist the traffic with my ISP so that I can charge the traffic for FREE for that specific URL - rather than whitelist the traffic of all google analytics (Which the ISP cannot do due to the heavy traffic generated by it) ?
You do not need to whitelist any traffic from your ISP. GA tracking works by collecting data from visitors to your site and has nothing to do with all other traffic on sites hosted by your ISP. As long as you have your tracking code on all of your own pages, then your site traffic will be tracked.
is there a way in google analytics that we can retrieve user information, like ip, time browse etc? I need to track specific user on our website but it seems it was impossible
Google Analytics does not display a users IP address to you, while you could in theory save this in a custom dimension, along with other personal information about your user.
Personal information:
The Google Analytics terms of service, which all Google Analytics customers must adhere to, prohibits sending personally identifiable information (PII) to Google Analytics (such as names, social security numbers, email addresses, or any similar data), or data that permanently identifies a particular device (such as a mobile phone’s unique device identifier if such an identifier cannot be reset), even in hashed form. Your Google Analytics account could be terminated and your data destroyed if you use any of this information.
Answer: It is not possible to receive personal user specific information from Google Analytics, while it is possible for you to send this information yourself in the form of a custom dimension it is not advisable because it is against the terms of service.
All Information in Google Analytics can not be directly related back to a specific user.
I have an Intranet application which is accessible from within company firewall. To track some specific pages, I want to implement Google Analytics in my Intranet application. This application is accessible from outside only when user system has some specific certificate installed.
Is it possible to implement Google Analytics in my Intranet application?
Will this Google analytics work inside company firewall?
How Google analytics work i.e. what is the actual flow of google analytics?
Yes, Google analytics can be used for internal web applications too. Please visit this URL which will clear your doubts. If you click on the given link and able to access analytics.js file from your internal network you can use Google analytics for your internal applications protected from corporate firewall.
Please note that after implementation, tracking data would be available around 24 hours only. So, you need to wait for 24 hours first. Even if you are not able to view the tracking data, please visit this link. You will find the possible reasons behind not working your analytics code.
In order for Analytics to generate reports for your corporate intranet
usage, your corporate network must be able to reach the Analytics
JavaScript file (analytics.js).
...
Your intranet must also be accessible
through a fully qualified domain name such as
http:// intranet.example.com. The Analytics JavaScript won't work if
your intranet can only be accessed using a domain name that isn't
fully qualified, such as http:// intranet
Ref: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009688?hl=en
In your example, if a person without the certificate you mentioned can still reach the domain (that is, there is a public DNS entry for the domain name) even if they get an 'access denied' or similar message, the tracking should still work.
Google Analytics is Software as a Service and runs on the Google Servers. If your clients cannot reach the Google server than you cannot send tracking data and Google Analytics will not show anything. You may need to adjust your firewall rules to let calls to the Analytics servers pass (are you that you want a third party javascript to send data from your intranet to the internet, though ? There might be legal ramifications, too, after all implementing a script basically means to hand control of the clients to a third party).
If the server for your intranet is connected to the internet you could collect all hits in a log and pipe this to Google Analytics.
However Google Analytics might not be the best choice. You most certainly do not need campaign data, you probably do not have ecommerce in your company and depending on your type of company geo data and technology data might not be relevant (after all you probably know what computers your employees use and where they are). And for a page counter a self hosted solution will do just as well.
Google Analytics requires that you place a script on each page you wish to track. Whenever a page with the script is loaded, the script runs and sends data to GA, so your users must be connected to the internet as well as the intranet for their usage statistics to register. One security issue to consider is the titles of your intranet's pages will be sent externally across the intranet, which your IT security may have an issue with.
For basic intranet analytics, I'd recommend starting with Piwik which is open source and installs on your server.
It will give you a lot of initial usage data and if your customer decides they want more, you can look into more sophisticated products.
I am most interested in an answer for Android, though it would be great to know if the answer is generalizable to websites, iOS, etc. Can I anonymize IPs (using setAnonymizeIp()) in Google Analytics and still track unique visitors? I understand Google Analytics uses cookies for websites, and so I thought it might be possible (or perhaps even automatic).
Yes. The only effect that the anonymizeIp function is that it instructs Google to remove the last octet of the IP address from it's logs.
So, if your user's IP is:
123.45.678.90
And you run this function, Google will store it as:
123.45.678.XX
The only practical effect is that this results in less accurate Geographic reporting, but that's it. It won't affect counts of unique visitors in any way, and is totally unrelated to how GA tracks unique visitors, since Google Analytics does not rely on IP addresses for unique visitor identification. For websites, maintaining unique user identification is done by the Google Analytics cookies. In this specific case, the Google Analytics Android SDK handles the user session management for you using a local storage mechanism analogous to cookies.
I dont know if the accepted answer is correct. I've enabled setAnonymizeIp myself on my app, and it had a huge effect on my analytics results.
Pages/visit shot up.
Visits halfed.
Avg time on site shot up.
Ip address is not the value used to identify a unique visitor/user on Google Analytics, so it shouldn't be an issue. Analytics uses a unique identifier in a cookie or mobile app data so attach to all of the user's hits in order to identify as a unique visitor, so I don't see a reason why ip masking should affect it.
Is there a way to keep one's IP excluded from Google Analytics logs even when it occasionally changes ? I'm asking because even if I was informed that my IP changed I would still find boring to go each time in GA to update the IP.
The best way to do that is using a blocking cookie. You'll have to execute some js code from your domain and create a filter in analytics:
http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55481