The first line there is how many times in total I’ve visited the site (above this, which I’ve skipped for brevity, it also records the time I first visited, and a timestamp of my current visit).īelow that, the ‘Custom Var’ block is made up of elements BuzzFeed have actively decided “we need to record this in addition to what Google Analytics gives us out of the box”. Here’s a description of what’s going on there: They actually record much more than this, but this is just the info they pass to Google (stored within Google Analytics): Here’s a snapshot of what BuzzFeed records when you land on a page.

I’ll start with the fairly mundane stuff, and then move on to one example of some slightly more scary stuff. When you visit BuzzFeed, they record lots of information about you.