MergedAnalytics Security Information
Google Analytics code (and the other similar players) is highly obfuscated and nearly impossible to read or understand, yet most companies have no problem putting it on their servers all the time….with no questions asked.
By Contrast the “MergedAnalytics” code is very straight forward, benign and quite easy to understand.
There are 2 main pieces to our MergedAnalytics code… the <script> portion and the <noscript> portion.
Whichever of the two are used for tracking, MergedAnalytics only tracks the common CGI variables of the internet.
These items are public and open and are always exchanged between the client and server.
They do not rely on any form of code to do so.
Almost every HTTP/HTTPS server log captures this information from the headers each time a webpage is loaded. The variables retrieved are discussed in the following WIKI article.
The <noscript> portion is exactly what it sounds like, if the user has Javascript disabled when they navigate to a client site, this code will still post something to our servers to process. In this case, there is no way to track the activity from page using the HTTP_REFERER variable…but that is the only real difference.
In the <script> the MergedAnalytics code is 4 lines long :
Line #1 creates an image element on the current <html> DOM
Line #2 captures the url used to refer a user to this current page (for example, if someone searched Google, and they navigated to your home page…the referrer would be https://www.google.com)
Line #3 takes that data captured in line 2 and encodes it so it can be transmitted via HTTP/HTTPS
Line #4 sets the source of the image created in line 1 to a process URL on our server, with the client unique ID, and the encoded data captured in line #3
Summary
Your website visitor server logs are a gold mine. MergedAnalytics mines that information for you. All of the information MergedAnalytics reports on is already on your server. Our software analyzes the website visitor logs on your server and presents that information to you in a way that is useful and actionable for your organization including ….
- The visiting Company name and location
- How that company found your site ie. Keywords, Social Media, Press Release, Email etc…
- What they were interested while on your site. Pages clicker, videos and PDF’s clicked on etc…
- Much More…