urchinTracker: What it Does
We know that urchinTracker is a function and it ‘does stuff’, but what exactly does it do? While visitors engage with your website, urchinTracker is collecting information in the background. It identifies things like:
* Where the visitor came from
* How many times they’ve been to your site
* What content they are viewing
* Characteristics of their browsing environment (operating system, browser, etc.)
* The title of the current website page
* etc.
Please note that urchinTracker is not collecting any personally identifiable information. It is collecting generic information about the visitor.
After it collects the data, it sends it to Google Analytics in the form of a pageview. So every time urchinTracker runs, or as programmers say ‘executes’, it creates a pageview in Google Analytics. And, because urchinTracker is a function, we can add it to a web page multiple times. This means we can create multiple pageviews in Google Analytics every time a single page loads in the visitor’s browser.
http://cutroni.com/blog/2007/0...h-ga-pt-1-about-urchintracker/