Google Analytics FAQ - 10 Interesting Things

10 interesting facts and tricks about the Google Analytics program.

1. You can change the length of time that Google Analytics waits before timing out a visitor by adding a _utimeout variable to your tracking code.

2. There is no Google Analytics API to access reporting data. You can however exports reports to XML, CSV (Microsoft Excel) or Tab-Separated text format.

3. Google Analytics doesn’t offer automatic emailing of reports.

4. Google Analytics will track and analyze as many websites as you own but you are limited to 5 million pageviews per month.

5. After you first install the tracking code, it may take several hours for report data to appear in your account. Google Analytics generally updates your reports every hour, but data can take up to 6 hours to appear in your account.

6. You can make use of the _utmLinker JavaScript function when the links on your site require users to change root domain names - for example, from www.example.com to www.shoppingcart.com.

7. Google Analytics’ urchinTracker allows you to track events on your site that do not generate a pageview. Using the urchinTracker JavaScript, you can assign a specific page filename to Flash events, JavaScript events, file downloads, outbound links, and more. [Using the urchinTracker]

8. You can setup Google Analytics even if you do own the website domain. You only need access to the source of your webpages. If you’re able to update the content of your webpages, you should be able to set up Google Analytics.

9. Even though www.example.com/ may be the same page as www.example.com/index.html, they show up as two separate entries in your logs. You can tell Google Analytics to treat them as the same page by defining the Default page for your profile.

10. Google Analytics tracks referrals from 20 search engines as listed in the urchin.js JavaScript file. You can also configure Analytics to identify referrals from additional search engines by adding the following line to your tracking code:
_uOsr[20]=”search_engine_name”; _uOkw[20]=”query_variable”;