Today I’m going to speak to you about Universal Analytics. For those of you who haven’t heard of this before, it’s a new technology offered by Google Analytics, which allows website owners to track user data on their websites. Chances are, you’re currently using Google Analytics on your site anyway, so you’re probably wondering what the difference is between the existing platform and this new technology.
Google Analytics currently tracks data from a visit-centric perspective, whereas Universal Analytics takes a user-centric approach. I’m going to go through why this is beneficial as a website owner in a moment. You should know that Universal Analytics takes this approach by assigning a unique client identifier to each individual user on your website. The other difference is the way in which the actual data is collected. Google Analytics uses the ga.js library, whereas Universal Analytics uses the analytics.js library. This does mean that if you want to implement the Universal Analytics, then it does require a different tracking code on your website.
There’s also a difference in the cookies which are used between the two platforms. Google Analytics requires several cookies to actually track the data, whereas Universal Analytics only relies upon one, and even that isn’t compulsory. This new technology can be set up in such a way that no cookies whatsoever are required. Continue reading
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