Page Comparison

The goal of this page is to describe the redesign of the Web Analytics portion of Caskalytics

Background

Much of the tracking that happens on the web today is done via beacons (pixels, tags, etc) that are requested from a 3rd party server when the website user loads a webpage as seen below. 

Image Added

Probably the most popular tracker used online in Google Analytics. The system consists of two parts. The first is a small piece of javascript that runs on the client's browser to gather specific page information such as url, page title, screen resolution and other metrics. A full list of the metrics collected can be found here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/parameters#aip

And here is a sample request made to Google Analytics from the browser:

http://www.google-analytics.com/collect
?v=1
&_v=j41
&a=2076467505
&t=pageview
&_s=1
&dl=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.cask.co%2Fcdap%2F3.4.0-SNAPSHOT%2Fen%2Fsearch.html%3Fq%3Dcdap%2Bconfiguration%26utm_campaign%3Dcampaign%26utm_source%3Dsource%26utm_medium%3Dmedium%26utm_content%3Dcontent%26utm_keyword%3Dkeyword
&ul=en-us
&de=UTF-8
&dt=Search%20%E2%80%94%20Cask%20Data%20Application%20Platform%203.4.0-SNAPSHOT%20Documentation
&sd=24-bit
&sr=1280x800
&vp=1265x235
&je=0
&fl=21.0%20r0
&_u=QCCAgAAB~
&jid=17949930
&cid=1415295176.1456379066
&tid=UA-XXXXXX-X
&gtm=GTM-XXXXXXX
&z=1909841856

The second part of the system is the endpoint that handles the request from the tracking code. The service collects the information passed to it from the url as well as the request headers including Referer, User-Agent, and Remote Ip Address. This information is stored in a datastore and metrics are calculated, both in real time as well as batched.