Google Analytics is interesting. It has the lowest barrier to entry of any analytics tool (because it’s free) but is deceptively complex. As analysts, we should understand that no implementation is perfect. You can hire a team of consultants to audit and correct low-hanging fruit of your implementation, but your business isn’t stagnant. It’s fluid. Even … Read more
If you subscribe to this blog, you have probably heard this 100 times before. It’s a classic case of some stakeholder or HiPPO wanting to measure clicks on every single element on every single page so they can ask every single question that will waste every single minute of every single day until you burn … Read more
In the beginning, things were just OK. Everyone accepted this until the great designer had a bright idea and decided things should be OK GREAT! This tickled humans because OK GREAT was much more exciting than OK. OK was still acceptable – so was ACCEPT – but people began to feel OK wasn’t enough. “We want some personality” … Read more
Mastering the technical side of web analytics can be pretty daunting – especially given most web analysts rely on developers for implementation, debugging, and sometimes general QA. For those analysts, it would be great to have a short guide that helps debug some common issues. “My bounce rate increased to close to 100%!” This one can be … Read more
So Tealium has this thing called AudienceStream – it’s a really neat tool that helps you build personas and deliver custom content to those personas. It’s incredibly slick and actually looks/behaves like a feature proposal I brought to the DTM (then Satellite) team 2 years ago. 2 years later it isn’t there and we have to work … Read more
Note: Since this was posted in mid-2013, the domain measureboards.com has since expired. Womp womp. So there are these new nifty things in Universal Analytics that take the place of your typical Custom Variable. These are Custom Dimensions/Metrics. I’m not talking about the Custom Data Source. I’ll save that for when I’m actually able to … Read more
The other day I was writing a function in JavaScript. Alright, before you say it – yes, it was broken in IE7/8. However, sometimes when you use common functions like trim and innerText you don’t really think about compatibility… especially if you’re an analyst. That’s what we call “knowing enough JavaScript to be dangerous.” Now normally … Read more
Bounce rate too high? It may not be as serious as you think! Let’s start off by defining what “too high” means. For most sites, a bounce rate over 50% is a sign of trouble. For blogs, one can be over 65% simply because RSS feeds lure people into viewing only one page and then … Read more
Alright, I don’t intend on making this a regular column – but sometimes I run into an issue that takes a bit of troubleshooting. This is one of those issues. Seeing an unusual spike in traffic in Google Analytics? Bounce rate skyrocketing? It might not be a traffic quality issue! Check your implementation. Follow this … Read more
Tracking between subdomains doesn’t have to be complicated. You don’t need to check that box in the Google Analytics admin section for cross-domain or cross-subdomain tracking to work. All it does is edit the snippet in the copy/paste box: All that does is add a line of code in the “Tracking Code” section. It should … Read more