Extras: Technical Details – RUGA pt. 11

Are we here already? We’re done with the main aspects of the utm.gif and on to the tail end of RUGA. The  “extras” section, if you will. These are the loose odds and ends that Google Analytics collects for technology reports. These are all pretty simple, and so this will be a short post.

The sequence for collecting this information is much the same as what we’ve already covered. The GATC executes on page load, javascript collects a bunch of data about the clients system, and those are then reported to Google Analytics through a utm.gif request. This doesn’t write into cookies, it just goes straight into the query request.

Below is an example of the utm.gif call that is made when you load cardinalpath.com:

https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?
 utmwv=4.9.4
 &utms=3
 &utmn=426445686
 &utmhn=www.cardinalpath.com
 &utmcs=UTF-8
 &utmsr=1680x1050
 &utmsc=32-bit
 &utmul=en-us
 &utmje=1
 &utmfl=10.3%20r181
 ...

You can see here:

• utmwv = tracking code version
• utmcs = character encoding
• utmsr = “Screen Resolution”
• utmsc = “Screen Colors”
• utmul = “Language (lang|lang-CO|-)”
• utmje = “JavaScript Enabled? (0|1)”
• utmfl = “Flash version”

Sometimes you’ll also get utmjv, which tells your JavaScript version.

This data is processed on Google’s side, populated into reports and made available to you.  You can find most of it under “Visitors > Technology” in the V5 interface.

And that actually concludes this series (at least for now).