Start simple right? And what is more simple than a pageview? Wait… what exactly is a pageview?
This is something that’s been daunting me for a while. Pageviews are unlike a lot of stuff in Analytics in that they aren’t counted in cookies, nor really in the utm.gif. A pageview is defined by the loading of a page but we all know that it’s not REALLY that. Nothing in analytics is ever REALLY what it seems to be.
Quick refresher: how does GA get your data?
Actually, it ends up there’s slightly more to it than that.
Google doesn’t know when a page loads. They know when _trackpageview() [eg. _trackPageview(‘/product334a/learn-more’)] sends a query to their system. From that they can extrapolate that a page was loaded. Then, each time the this code is executed, it creates a time stamp on Google’s servers. Simple right?
You wish.
So a page was loaded. Which page? What was it’s title? Where were they coming from? What host served it? A pageview itself is meaningless without other data and that’s where the very concept of a “pageview” gets confusing.
So let’s say Google knows that the tracking code was called, how can they determine a particular pageview?
A pageview comprises a LOT of data in the gif request.
We have the usuals:
And we have the following which are more specific to the request:
https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLoginAuth?continue=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fanalytics%2Fsettings%2F&followup=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fanalytics%2Fsettings%2F&service= analytics&nui=1&hl=en
And of course a few which we will get into in later posts:
Let’s take a closer look at the values specific to this request:
And there is actually one more hidden in here:
utmt – this is the type of request being made. Normally this would designate an event, transaction, item or custom variable. However, in the case of a pageview this field just doesnt appear – pageview is the default type of gif request.
And there you have a pageview. Not as simple as it seems.
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