What does __utma mean?

Question

What does it mean when you see things like:

?__utma=1.32168570.1258672608.1258672608.1259628772.2&__utmb=1.4.10.1259628772& 

etc. in url string?

It may be simple, but I think about it, which I don’t know about, because I see it every time and again.

Answer 1

Here is a good link to explain them. These are cookies used by Google Analytics to track information on your website:

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

Answer 2

Your browser does not support cookies. This is the reason you see this in the url. In fact, Google uses the __utma , __utmb , __utmc , __utmz cookies to track information. When cookies are disabled, the browser passes this information via the URL as a GET parameter.

Answer 3

These are URL parameters, they send information back to the web server.

protocol://username:password@server:port?parameterList#anchorName

Example:

http://stackoverflow.com:80/page?param1=value1¶m2=value2

• #anchorName skip you to a specific part of the HTML page
• The parameterList part is also called a query.
• The protocol part is also called the scheme.
• The username:password may be skipped
• port will default to 80 if protocol is HTTP and port not specified
• If you do not specify protocol in a web browser, it will be HTTP by default.
• You often want one page to do several things. This is achieved by taking different parameters. These parameters usually transmit information to the server, which will change the way the next page displays or how another action is performed on the server.
• Sometimes URL parameters are replaced with beautiful URLs. This is achieved using new web frameworks such as ASP.NET MVC, Django, Ruby on Rails, etc.

There is a more detailed description of what I gave in RFC 3986: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): general syntax .

Answer 4

This is due to google analytics ... it was used for tracking. Although I suspect Brian is responding to what you really asked ...

Answer 5

__Utma cookies This cookie is called a “persistent” cookie because it never expires (technically it expires ... in 2038 ... but for the sake of explanation, let's pretend that it never expires). This cookie keeps track of how many times a visitor visited a cookie site when their first visit was and when their last visit. Google Analytics uses the information in this cookie to calculate things like Days and Visits for a purchase.

__Utmb and __utmc cookies Cookies B and C are brothers who work together to calculate how long a visit takes. __utmb takes the timestamp of the exact point in time when the visitor enters the site, and __utmc takes the timestamp of the exact point in time when the visitor leaves the site. __utmb expires at the end of the session. __utmc waits 30 minutes and then expires. You see, __utmc does not know when the user closes his browser or leaves the website, so he waits 30 minutes for another page view, and if it does not, it expires.

[Joe Teixeira]