Google Analytics - Data collection

Google Analytics uses tracking code to collect data. It doesn’t matter if you are tracking a website, mobile app or other digital environment -- it’s the tracking code that gathers and sends the data back to your account for reporting.

How tracking works

Depending on the environment you want to track -- a website, mobile app, or other digital experience -- Google Analytics uses different tracking technology to create the data hits. For example, there is specific tracking code to create hits for websites and different code to create hits for mobile apps.

In addition to creating hits, the tracking code also performs another critical function. It identifies new users and returning users. We’ll explain how the tracking code does this in later lessons.

Another key function of the tracking code is to connect your data to your Google Analytics account. This is accomplished through a unique identifier embedded in your tracking code.

Google Analytics uses different tracking technology to measure user activity depending on the specific environment you want to track -- websites, mobile apps, or other digital experiences. To track data from a website, Google Analytics provides a standard snippet of JavaScript tracking code. This snippet references a JavaScript library called analytics.js that controls what data is collected.

Adding the Google Analytics JavaScript code to your website

You simply add the standard code snippet before the closing </head> tag in the HTML of every web page you want to track. This snippet generates a pageview hit each time a page is loaded. It’s essential that you place the Google Analytics tracking code on every page of your site

Collecting and sending data with the Measurement Protocol

The Measurement Protocol lets you send data to Google Analytics from any web-connected device. Recall that the Google Analytics JavaScript and mobile SDKs automatically build hits to send data to Google Analytics. However, when you want to collect data from a different device, you must manually build the data collection hits. The Measurement Protocol defines how to construct the hits and how to send them to Google Analytics.