CODEWITHSUNDEEP
urlanalytics
Ted Logan
Ted Logan

Reputation: 414

Analytics - Where do the parameters come from

Google Analytics provides me a list of called links of my website. I wonder where these requests came from and what they effect.

e.g. www.mywebsite.com/subpage/?ls=1
www.mywebsite.com/subpage/?q=keyword
www.mywebsite.com/subpage/?q=13123sdd

What does ?ls=1 and ?q=keyworddo? And where do they came from? Especially the keywords

Upvotes: 0

Views: 33

Answers (1)

Amadan
Amadan

Reputation: 198556

Those are GET parameters, and most commonly they come as a result of posting forms (or just by clicking on links with such URLs).

For (the most well-known) example, if you go to https://www.google.com and enter "test" and press Enter, you will go to a page http://google.com/search?q=test (with likely a bunch of other parameters as well). In a very simplified scenario, it would be because the box where you input your search string is an input element with name="q" contained in a form element with method="GET" action="/search"; when you submit the form (by pressing Enter), the browser will make the url by adding all the parameter to the form's action like this:

action?param1=value1&param2=value2...

or in this case, /search?q=test.

(In Google's specific case, this is not actually what is happening, because of various kinds of JavaScript magic that is normally going on; but that magic in the end does the same thing. But it could: if you turned off JavaScript on Google, then what I described would be exactly what would happen.)

As I said, you can submit that same URL literally, without having to go through a form. For example, you can click directly on this link to find some kittens: https://google.com/search?q=kittens

Parameters submitted with other methods than GET do not appear in URLs, and cannot be submitted merely by clicking a link, only through forms (which also support POST method) or JavaScript (which can submit any kind of method: GET, POST, or other methods not available to forms or links, like PUT, DELETE...)

As to what they do, nothing by themselves. They are interpreted by the www.mywebsite.com server, in any way they want. In Google's case, q is the query to search from, and what they do is give you (hopefully) relevant results to it. In www.mywebsite.com's case? No idea. Could be anything.

Upvotes: 1

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