9. Google Analytics¶

Google makes a “free” service to help you analyze traffic on your site. If you include code that downloads a Google tracker on all your websites, they’ll give you stats on who comes to your website.

First, sign up for Google Analytics:

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web

Next, you ad a tracker like this to every HTML page you have. It goes just before the close </body> tag.

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=G-C7W6VSD1H5"></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
  gtag('js', new Date());

  gtag('config', 'G-C7W6XXD1H5');
</script>

Because you load this script every time you pull a page on your website, Google can keep and track analytics. You get this “free”.

What does Google get out of this? They know the users that went to your websites. And because almost every website uses their analytics, they can track that user from one website to another. This allows for more targeted ads. And a scary amount of profiling.