How is Meiro Events different from Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

Meiro Events is very specific and customizable to the client’s use case. 

In Meiro Events, it is possible to track differentthese types of events: 

• Pageviews

• Outbound link click

• Custom Event
• Contact form

• Google client ID sync

• Facebook client ID sync

• Optimizely data sync

• Web banner impression

• Web banner click

• Custom Event

• Contact Form submit

All the events sent by SDK may be enriched by additional data on the ME backend server:

• Cookies

• Geolocation

• Headers

• Referer parts

• URL parts

• User agent

Learn more: about which events you can track here.  

Example:

You can collect data from any form with the contact_form_submit event. You can set data collection on any custom event you want. It is fully customisable and not only limited to simple pageviews or sessions. You can have predefined fields or fields that are fully customized which allows you to track any information you want. Custom_event is also available where website administrators can define what events they want to track. 

Learn more: full list or custom_event available here, read more about Meiro Events here. 

Google Analytics tracks only:data through: 

• Pageviews

  automatically collected events (pageviews, bounce rates, sessions, durations)

• Bounce rates

  enhanced measurement (e.g. scroll, file download, etc.)

• Sessions

  recommended events

• Durations

  custom events

Google Analytics collects events that only contain information about URL, device, sessions, and generates a basiccustom analytics report about it. 

Reports available through Google Analytics contain mostly website traffic, devices used, etc.

Due to Google's privacy policy,legislation, Google doesn't allow the collection of personally identifiable information (PII). Recent development in this field, suggests that using U.S.-based cloud services might be illegal altogether.

Learn more: full list of Google Analytics doesevents not track PII data (personally identifiable information).   here.

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

Meiro Events offers flexible, customizable deployment models.

It is possible to deploy Meiro Events with user id as the 1st party cookie (either on the client's server or domain where the owner sets DNS). In addition, the expiration of the cookie is also longer, up to 2 years. (refer to the different browsers: here). 

Google Analytics assigns Google Client ID. 

Google Analytics collects events in the main Google domain.  

For this reason,  Google Analytics ID is often set as a 3rd party cookie. Therefore, browsers can easily block any tracking events and the cookie expiration can be short (like 7 days for Safari), depending on the browser. 

Because data is sent to a different domain (Google) than the website, Google Analytics can be easily blocked. The script is fetched from Google public domain, so everyone knows its location hence it can be blocked easily.  

Google Analytics can also be set as a 1st party cookie, but via document.cookie on javascript.

With document.cookie command, you can include any content and domain (can be on meiro.io fetching 3rd party data javascript, can be fetching data from Google Analytics via Google domain). 

This shows that with document.cookie, anyone can set a 1st party cookie on any website.

But even though it is possible, javascript cookies are not as trustworthy compared to http cookies (used by Meiro) that are set by the server where the domain is configured and it is easy to determine if the server domain matches the website domain.

That's why document.cookie expires after a few days on some browsers.

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

If you deploy Meiro Events on the client owned domain(same as tracked application - 1st party data): 

• Longer lifetime & more precise tracking.
• Will not be blocked by browsers or extensions.
• Privacy (only accessible via the domain that created it). If you deploy Meiro Events to meiro.io domain (different from track application - 3rd party application).

• Personalisation (get relevant content, ads, etc).

Google Analytics can be blocked if added to the privacy blocker blocklist. If blockers are enabled, this will not allow Google Analytics to use tracking codes.

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

Meiro Events also provides meiro_user_id where each id is unique for each user. 

​​To identify the user, Meiro Events looks for user id cookies. In cases when a cookie can not be found, Meiro Events look for it in the local storage (browser's permanent storage). It is important to know that often users delete cookies but do not clear local storage, therefore the information stored there is safer. 

In cases when it is not possible to find a user id cookie in the website’s browser, a new cookie user id is assigned to the user. 

Meiro Events server stores and enriches the events from the information collected from a website.

There is no unique id that will enable you to identify that multiple entries are from the same user.

So each time a user accesses from a different device or browser, it will be identified as a new session, a new user. There is not much possibility to connect those actions.

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

The session is set with some initial event and it lasts for 30 minutes. Every user that visits a website receives a Session ID, every event sent to Meiro Events from the same users within the next 30 minutes has the same session ID.  If there is an event that comes after 30 minutes, a new Session ID is generated.

Through an identity stitching algorithm, Meiro may be able to assign two different sessions to one customer profile. 

A session expires 30 minutes  (pageview, event, or transaction). Afterward, it will be considered as a new session. 

A session in Google Analytics is a group of interactions recorded when a user visits your website within a given period. Google Analytics session begins when a user visits a page on your site and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or when the user leaves.

So any activity after 30 minutes will be counted as a new session, assigned to a new user.

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

Meiro Events does not sample data, so you get a complete picture of your data. 

The free version of Google Analytics begins sampling data for non-default reports that exceed 500,000 sessions; Google Analytics 360 for reports that exceed 100 million sessions. 

This means that analyzed is only a sample of your data, which does not say about the whole database. 

Meiro Events 

Google Analytics

Meiro Events processes data almost in near real-time.

For the free version of Google Analytics to get data, it takes up to a few hours to more than 1 day. 

For Google Analytics 360 (paid version) it can be approximately 4 hours.