Why Google Analytics cannot be used for educational web content

Current web analytics are focused on e-commerce sites, where the visits have to converge in a purchase. The behavior of e-learning environments users is driven by information acquiring. The learning process takes time, and therefore a visit on an educational site does not apply to the heuristics used by most analytics instruments (i.e. ending a visit after 30 minutes of inactivity). Moreover, an integrated analytics instrument may benefit from extended knowledge to better identify unique visitors. This paper proves that such a system is much more reliable than a system that bases its decisions on cookies (e.g., Google Analytics).