Web analytics and IE standards modes

Question

I tried looking for this question online and even on this site, but could not find the exact answer I was looking for. So I apologize if this question is repeated.

My question is about how web analytics tools report which version of IE a user is using and if that is based on the various browser mode/standards mode. So for example when I build a site I can include the meta tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" > 

Just in case for anyone who doesn't know, this will force IE to render the page using IE 7 standards. You can do this for almost any version of IE from 7 & up.

So lets say I use this on my site. When I have my analytics tool (lets say web trends), grab the users version of IE will it show as IE7 even if they are using IE8?

Answer 1

It would be recorded as IE8 even if you set it as IE7. The emulation does not affect User-Agent send to google. The _utm.gif does not send the browser version in the get request. Google gets that information from the http header which is always send if it makes a request.

Google says this about it: "The HTTP request for any web page contains details about the browser and the computer making the request, such as the hostname, the browser type, referrer, and language."

This is what the request looks like for google on an IE7 emulated page, notice the user agent. (just tested it myself) results:

Request: GET /__utm.gif?utmwv=5.2.9&utms=4&utmn=1555859696&containing-datazzz HTTP/1.1
Accept: image/png, image/svg+xml, image/*;q=0.8, */*;q=0.5
Referer: http://www.wiremedia.nl/ietest.html
Accept-Language: nl-NL
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/5.0)
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Host: www.google-analytics.com
Connection: Keep-Alive