Chapter 3. Under the Covers: How Google Analytics Works

Understanding the Google Analytics architecture—how it collects data, processes data, and creates reports—is the key to understanding many of the advanced topics that we will discuss later in this book. Google Analytics can collect data from a number of different platforms using different tracking technologies, which makes things complicated.

Google Analytics is no longer a simple “hit collector” for websites, but rather an information aggregation system that collects data from standard websites, mobile websites, Adobe Air applications, and iPhone and Android apps. Google has progressively added more data collection methods as technology has driven new and different ways of distributing content to people.