In normal implementations of Google Analytics, you simply add some tracking JavaScript onto the page and all the features of Google Analytics are available to you. This add-on cannot do everything that normal Google Analytics does. The reason for this is that Google Analytics JavaScript code runs in an iframe on a completely different domain to your Jira Cloud instance. With this restriction comes limitations in what data can be collected.
We do the absolute best we can to implement Google Analytics as fully as possible.
Some things, unfortunately, slip through the cracks:
Jira screens other than issue screens – Atlassian only allows us to track in issues screens within Jira and most JSM portal screens.
Areas where tracking cannot currently be loaded:JSM knowledge-base screens
Rapid boards
Jira dashboards
Referrer – We can't get the referrer of the parent frame. In fact, it's worse than that, Atlassian actually block the add-on from knowing the URL of the page in which is it present by using the
referrer-policy="no-referrer"attribute on their iframes (find out more). This means that we cannot determine where the user was prior to arriving on your Jira Cloud instance.Source – this is based on a referrer from another domain. As we can't find the referrer, we certainly can't find the source
Tracking anonymous users – Right now, we can only track logged in users, so we cannot track anonymous users. This is due to a bug in the Atlassian Connect/Jira...
AC-1908 Hosted data storage properties should be readable by anonymous users
💡 Starting in the November 2021 release of Google Analytics in Jira, we will no longer have this problem, because the Google Analytics configuration will be securely saved within our app rather than within Jira app properties
It doesn't work on mobile – Sorry about that, but it seems that Atlassian Connect is not supported on mobile devices right now.
If you want support for mobile apps, vote for AC-2225 or ask Atlassian to do something about it.