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Strictly speaking, GA is always 3rd party (it would only be 1st party if/when its used to measure google-analytics.com which is not a user-facing domain). For m

Strictly speaking, GA is always 3rd party (it would only be 1st party if/when its used to measure google-analytics.com which is not a user-facing domain). For measuring any other website, its 3rd party. I believe that this would limit GA's ability to store data in cookies on my system (user or session-based attributes). GA could still create unique identifiers based on my user or session-based attributes and store those IDs on their own servers, then call them back up when I revisit the site. I'm still coming up to speed on this, maybe someone with more experience could correct or clarify my statements.

lmkg 6y ago
In the context of web analytics, first-party vs third-party usually refers to how the user is identified, not to where the analytics status is hosted. Google Analytics uses first-party data for its tracking. Third-party tracking builds a universal profile of the user across the internet, first-party tracking builds user profiles that are silo'd to the website. Google Analytics stores a first-party cookie with a unique ID for each user. This is used to de-duplicate traffic from the same user to the same domain. This cookie not shared across websites. If you go to example.com and website.com, those are two different first-party cookies without views into each other. Optionally, Google Analytics can be configured correlated this with a third-party cookie from google.com for advertising purposes. This allows the website owner for example.com to connect a user converting on example.com to that same user having seen or clicked an ad on google.com. It also allows the website owner to target ads on google.com towards users based on their activity on example.com Previous iterations of Safari's ITP have outright blocked the third-party cookie, and have limited first-party cookies based on whether they're HTTP cookies or JavaScript cookies.

lmkg 6y ago

In the context of web analytics, first-party vs third-party usually refers to how the user is identified, not to where the analytics status is hosted. Google Analytics uses first-party data for its tracking. Third-party tracking builds a universal profile of the user across the internet, first-party tracking builds user profiles that are silo'd to the website. Google Analytics stores a first-party cookie with a unique ID for each user. This is used to de-duplicate traffic from the same user to the same domain. This cookie not shared across websites. If you go to example.com and website.com, those are two different first-party cookies without views into each other. Optionally, Google Analytics can be configured correlated this with a third-party cookie from google.com for advertising purposes. This allows the website owner for example.com to connect a user converting on example.com to that same user having seen or clicked an ad on google.com. It also allows the website owner to target ads on google.com towards users based on their activity on example.com Previous iterations of Safari's ITP have outright blocked the third-party cookie, and have limited first-party cookies based on whether they're HTTP cookies or JavaScript cookies.