The Mysterious Google Analytics Site at gaqa07.org
Its not a bird nor a plane, etc. but it is one of the most intriguing Google Analytics sites I've encountered. Could this be one of the QA sites used by a GA development team?
It has no rational objective to win any "Coolest Site" award. In fact, its one of the most bland and boring sites out there, UNLESS you're a GAeek — in which case its almost as cool as the iframe pages in our "Slicing and Dicing" posts ( Part 1 and Part 2)
gaqa07.org's home page menu links simply divide the site into GA.js and urchin.js and from there, menus lead one into the depths of Goals, eCommerce, events demonstrations and tests - to an almost complete array of the GA & urchin's feature sets.
There are often different methods exhibited of performing tracking like events. The source code is a great source of example code.
The site also features some of the less frequently used features such as character sets and folder paths for cookies.
Then there is gaqa06.org which is used to demonstrate/test some cross-domain features.
Each page also shows the data in GA's cookies. Using it together with WASP forms a powerful alliance.
For those with a basic understanding of GA tagging and data tracking, it's a great learning tool.
For others it can also serve as a test bed for figuring out those gaps in the documentation or our own understanding, shedding light into the black box.
With the owner's permission, one can also copy the code to one's own server, use one's own Web Property ID and capture the data in one's own GA profile.
Which brings me to the mystery question: Who is the owner? The Whois on the domain shows registered to one Jim Napier, but I've not managed to get the whois on Jim Napier.
The short URL describes its purpose well but gives little clue to its ownership.
Any help in this regard would be appreciated, particularly from Jim.
In the meantime, check out the site at gaqa07.org
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The site is as you surmised, nothing more than a very basic set of docs for testing purposes. Our goal is to create in a very controlled way the real user experience as our clients see it when using Analytics, and to the degree we can to learn how to test the product better from this perspective. So we have this paired set of sites where we can simulate various types of referrals, generate transactions, set campaigns, and so on. And we even have real organic search and paid click traffic. I assume it was our inadvertent exposure in Google search results that led you to the site.
The simplicity of the site is a requirement not only to lower maintenance overhead but because we want the traffic we generate to produce results that are as deterministic as possible when certifying correct behavior or surfacing problems. In your post it's clear you see the value of this. It makes me think you may be on to something with regards to this being a useful learning tool. I think I'd like to pursue that with you.
There's a bit of irony in the fact the the site's blandness attracted your attention. It was my hope that anyone who stumbled onto it would assume it was under construction and just go away. But this yielded a pleasant return for me. One thing I can't do is generate a lot of interesting geographic data because the majority of the traffic to the test site comes from the same location. Your post resulted in traffic from around the world and my Map Overlay and Networks reports got a whole lot more useful. Maybe there's a practical partnership to be had here.
Regards,
Jim Napier