Google Analytics is a powerful tool used by businesses and marketers to track user behavior on their websites. It provides valuable insights into user behavior, allowing businesses to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies. The question of when Google Analytics will stop being able to identify sessions from the same user by default is an important one for businesses to consider.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It provides valuable insights into user behavior on a website, such as how many people visited, how long they stayed, what pages they viewed, and more. It also provides demographic information, such as the age, gender, and location of the visitors. Businesses and marketers use this information to inform their marketing strategies and make informed decisions about their websites.
When Will GA Stop Identifying Sessions?
Google Analytics is able to identify sessions from the same user by default, but this is not a permanent solution. Eventually, Google Analytics will no longer be able to identify sessions from the same user by default. This will likely happen when it becomes too difficult to accurately track user behavior due to changes in technology or when user privacy becomes a greater priority.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for businesses and marketers to track user behavior on their websites. While Google Analytics is currently able to identify sessions from the same user by default, this is not a permanent solution. Businesses should keep an eye out for changes in technology or privacy that could affect their use of Google Analytics in the future.
In the past, Google Analytics was able to recognize when the same visitor would re-visit a website in the same browser session. However, this is no longer the case as of October 2019, when Google Analytics has introduced new changes which disable the ability to identify new visitor sessions from the same user by default.
These changes were introduced with the intention to protect user privacy and abide the data protection regulations such as the European Union’s GDPR. Google Analytics now defaults to a cross-domain tracking setting which anonymizes user sessions from multiple sites within the same browser. Furthermore, individual IP addresses of visitors are no longer tracked as part of this new default setting.
To keep track of individual visitors, companies are now required to create client-side identifiers such as user IDs or HTTP cookies. This allows a business to track a single user during different sessions and still remain compliant with the law. Companies are also able to modify the default setting to enable User-ID tracking, which would essentially allow their Google Analytics account to keep track of the same user even if they switch browsers. However, note that this is an opt-in setting and requires user consent.
In summary, as of October 2019, Google Analytics is no longer able to identify sessions from the same user by default. In order to do this, businesses are required to enable the User-ID tracking setting, for which they must receive consent from their users.
Reference
https://analytics.googleblog.com/2019/10/enhanced-user-privacy-in-google.html
