Have you heard all the fuss about machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data? If you think that you already have a ton of data from Google Analytics, you’d be right. But if you think that you can use Google Analytics data to train machine learning models, you’d likely be out of luck. The reason is that Google Analytics aggregates data at the session-level, which is not specific enough for machine learning. You need to be able to get data for each individual session, before it is aggregated.

It is easy to change the tracking code to get the right data that you can use for machine learning, but you can’t change or add data that is already in Google Analytics so it’s important to at least start collecting the data even if you don’t yet have a specific question or challenge that could be answered by machine learning.