Google Analytics’ new Universal Analytics tracks User IDs and therefore allows to connect multiple sessions (even across devices) from the same user.

Additionally it’s now possible to collect data over GA’s new HTTP API Measurement Protocol. One can send POST requests to a URL to track page views, events, e-commerce etc.

This allows you to track events that happen independently of any user interaction!

Imagine you bill your customers monthly for using your application. In the instant when the payment happens the user might not be using the application. Nevertheless you can send a POST request to Google Analytics to collect an e-commerce transaction.

Universal Analytics knows the two parameters cid (clientId) to identify a session by its cookie, and uid (userId) to identify a user by your application’s user-id. The cid is a required parameter, and uid is optional.

How does GA handle such server-side sent hits? To find out the details I went ahead and sent some events to the REST API:

• Example6: This event sent a uid and a cid that were both also used to browse the site with normal analytics.js.
• Example7: This event sent a uid that was used while browsing the site, but a fake cid was sent.

Both events were tracked properly, and assigned to the same user:

It’s important to notice that GA will treat the server sending the events as a normal client. It will use its Browser, Location etc (although you can override that with additional parameters):

The new Measurement Protocol is very powerful, and allows for use cases that were not previously possible. One can send an arbitrary (unique) session/cookie identifier, and use the userId to actually identify the user.

Next we will try to find out whether such uid-identified events can be used as goals for AdWords Optimizer…