Before delving deeper into the facts of Google Analytics, let’s understand a bit about it. Google Analytics, as the name itself suggests, is all about statistics and data analysis. It is useful for website owners to estimate traffic through search engines, social networks, direct visits and referring sites. There are certain facts pertaining to Google Analytics that you would be willing to know. Scroll down to know more about it –

1. The data stored in Google Analytics is guaranteed to remain accessible for a minimum period of 25 months on an ongoing basis. That is, you can have your websites’ traffic history available for about two years at any given point of time from Google Analytics.

2. In Google Analytics, ten million is the monthly page view limit for a website [10 million hits per month per     property]. For premium Google Analytics accounts, the limit goes up to 1 billion hits per month. For those with     over 1 billion hits per month, tiered pricing is also available.

3. 1250 Google Analytics Profiles can be created using SINGLE Google Account Login. Statistically, once you get the Login ID credentials, , you can create about 25 Google analytics accounts with a Google login and 50 profiles per Google Analytics account which equates to 1250 (25 X 50) profiles per Google login.

4. Google Analytics could utilize maximum of first 5 party cookies: _utma, _utmb, _utmz  _utmv  and _utmx via the ga.js library to record information about what a user has seen or done on a particular page. It sets these cookies at the domain specified in the document.host browser property and with the root level path. The _utma is unique visitor cookie and _utmb is session cookie and _utmz is Campaign cookie and _utmv visitor segmentation cookie and _utmx is Google Analytics Content Experiment cookie.

5. You will be amazed to know that Google Analytics Cookies have lifetime as well which are as follows:

• _utma , _utmv and _utmx cookies expire after 2 years from the last time your visitor visited the site, every time user re-visits the site the cookie expiry date gets reset to last for another two years.
• _utmb cookie either expires after 30 minutes of inactivity on a website or at the end of a day.
• _utmc – this cookie expires as soon as you close the browser window.
• _utmz cookie expires after 6 months from the last time your visitor visited the site.

Read more about cookie at:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage

6. Google Analytics was originally based on Urchin on Demand. Urchin was a web design and hosting company which was started by Paul Muret and Scott Crosby in the late 90’s. In 1998, they decided to focus solely on their Urchin Software. Google bought the company in early 2005.

7. There could only be up to 20 Goals [key performance indicators] which could be set in Google Analytics per profile/ per reporting view. For instance, if you have four sets of goals,each goal will have five slots. The Goals cannot be deleted; they could however, be turned off so the reporting on those Goals ceases.