As was promised in our last WUG meeting in July, we now have an improved set of code for embedding your Google Analytics (GA) tracking into your State web sites. In addition to the standard set of GA capability, this improved code includes the following features:
1. Filtering out the last 3 digits of the IP address. Consequently utilizing this set of the code means that your site visitors cannot be tracked by Google to an individual device. Analytics will still be collected concerning the type of device, etc. But not to an IP address uniquely identifying a specific device. Also analytics will not track to a specific location, but will still be collected regarding what city or town the traffic is coming from.
2. GA will now be tracking the downloading of file based content, like PDFs. In addition, GA will track when external links are “clicked” on.
Note: Depending upon how much file-based content you have on your site, this new tracking should increase the volumes of content views within your Google Analytics Dashboards.
3. Improving the performance of the actual execution of the code by combining both the State-wide tracking code along with the individual site tracking code into a single set of GA code embed. Previously it was often implemented as two separate sets of code.
This new GA tracking code package can be downloaded from our current Analytics page to upgrade your existing analytics. You will find it at the bottom of: https://webstandards.ca.gov/services/analytics/