I have universal analytics installed on my website, and want to parse the __utmz
cookie to get referral info. However, I never see this cookie set.
Has something changed? Any reason this isn't set?
I do see the _ga
cookie when I browse my site, and I see the __utmz
cookie in my browser cache if I go to other sites.
I checked out the docs, and don't see any reference to this changing recently, so a bit stumped.
You can create your own cookie and store the query string parameters that google analytics use (utm_campaign and etc). See this project as example: https://github.com/dm-guy/utm-alternative
It seems like with Universal Analytics, this cookie has disappeared, and you only get a single _ga cookie.
Source: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/cookie-usage
Also mentioned here: How to get the referrer, paid/natural and keywords for the current visitor in PHP with new Google Analytics?
Also given that analytics is primarily a tool to collect aggregated information, I couldn't find (and I doubt) that there is any way to query GA to get this info back, given the
_ga
cookie.Universal Analytics doesn't create any __utm* cookies.
However, you can use Universal Analytics code (analytics.js) AND the traditional code (ga.js) simultaneously on your site. This will allow you to populate your UA profile and scrape the values from __utmz.
Use below code to get utmz cookie along with your universal analytics js code