Has anyone found any documentation or research about what data is transfered to Google Analytics when it's added to a site. The main thing I'm wondering about is post data, but the details of exactly what is sent would be useful.
I'm considering implementing it on a sites that have a lot of private data on them. I'm wondering what data Google will capture, if any. (The sites are login only.) I'm needing proof so I can provided to the users.
The official information can be found here
The visitor tracking information that you can get in the Google Analytics reports depends on Javascript code that you include in your website pages, referred to as the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC). Initial releases of the GATC used a Javascript file called urchin.js.
That script is then discussed in detail in that blog, and Google Analytics Help group can also provide some details.
a More detailed list of what that javascript collect is listed here.
look at http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js under the function urchinTracker and you'll see what's going on :)
All info passes via URL and post params:
Cache page
1
utmac
UA-745459-1
utmcc
__utma=52631473.656111131.1231670535.1235325662.1235336522.264;+__utmz=52631473.1235287959.257.8.utmccn =(organic)|utmcsr=google|utmctr=site:domain.com|utmcmd=organic;+
utmcs
windows-1255
utmdt
page title
utmfl
10.0 r12
utmhid
1524858795
utmhn
www.domain.com
utmje
1
utmn
1273285258
utmp
/shakeit/?
utmr
0
utmsc
32-bit
utmsr
1280x800
utmul
en-us
utmwv
1.3
Host
www.google-analytics.com
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept
image/png,image/;q=0.8,/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language
en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding
gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset
ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive
300
Connection
keep-alive
Referer
http://www.hadash-hot.co.il/shakeit/?&page=1
Pragma
no-cache
Cache-Control
no-cache
I found the official google documentation here:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingTroubleshooting.html
i also found this very discussion VERY useful:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google%20Analytics/thread?tid=5f11a529100f1d47&hl=en
helped me find out WTF utmcc actually DID