The Venture Skills Blog

One of the most important things about Search engine optimisation and any sort of on-line marketing is being able to measure our success. Enter Google Analytics a free service from Google which

generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical position.

- Wikipedia

It first appeared in 2005 after Google bought its parent company who’s software was called Urchin (indeed the script is still referred to as Urchin as we will see later) and is now used on literally thousands of blogs and sites across the world. Unlike many tracking software that your web host may provide you Google Analytics uses Javascript as its mean of tracking by placing a cookie on your visitors system. The pro’s of this includes the ability to find out far more about visitors, but also leads to privacy issues, and because javascript can be turned off and cookies disabled visitors can “avoid” tracking. Even with these limitations its still a great system and one we use on all our sites where possible.

Getting it up and running is simple so lets get started!
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I thought I would clear up to some misconceptions regarding the use of third party cookies on a site and in paticular statistic tracking cookies such as Google Analytics Urchin cookie. There are two misunderstandings regarding the use of cookies, 1 that its illegal to store a third party cookie on a persons computer, 2 it breaches accessibility guidelines neither of these are true. You do however need to declare the use of third party cookies both in your privacy document and in your P3P document and compact headers.

Google Analytics holds your data on machines in the United States and as such you need to reference that it is held under US law which may differ from local laws of the host site.

If you need further proof that its perfectly legal to use Google Analytics in the UK and elsewhere have a look at www.ico.gov.uk which is the site for the Information Commissioner’s Office the people who regulate and enforce privacy in the UK and who tracks stats using, guess what Google Analytics!
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