Why is it that such a simple thing as external link tracking in Google Analytics is almost always done wrong? Just today, I even saw a tweet from the official @googleanalytics account promoting a post on external link tracking:
How to measure outbound clicks from your site using Google Analytics and Tag Manager https://t.co/U8jLdCIaSv /by @ThomasPetracco #measure pic.twitter.com/AaP8rGsfnI
— Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) May 13, 2019 And the post has it wrong. Read more →
The concept of sessions in Google Analytics is a strange one. Part of that strangeness is that a session times out on its own after exactly 30 minutes of inactivity. By default that is. Or that it expires at midnight. Or when the campaign source changes - even mid visit (which is why you should never use UTM tags on internal links).
Often times, the expiration of sessions isn’t that big of a deal. Read more →
Apple recently announced version 2.1 of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP). ITP is a feature built in to the Safari browser. In short, it protects user privacy by restricting how cookies can be used and for how long they can stay active in the browser.
The first iterations of ITP focused intensely on third-party cookies. And rightly so. Third-party cookies are what ad tech companies have used to track individual users across different websites (cross site tracking). Read more →
One of the difficulties of working with a multilingual website is to decide on how to track it. Specifially, if you should use one single Google Analytics property for the entire site, or one property for each part (language) of the website. That’s what I’ll provide some thoughts on in this post.
Now, this is a huge topic in itself, so this post focuses on the Google Analytics Account Structure only - not on the actual implementation. Read more →
I’ve previously written a post on how to track clicks on internal links and call to actions. It’s really useful to measure which call to actions are actually clicked. But in some cases we might need more details. Such as knowing how long time it takes for our users to place that click. If users are taking a very long time before clicking a primary call to action, we might be able to help them by tweaking the text or our headers. Read more →
Updated November 20th, 2018. I updated the script to support newer iPhone models up to the iPhone XR and XS Max. Also rewrote the script to make it easier to maintain. Ever since the iPhone 4 came out, I’ve been a bit annoyed with the way mobile (Apple) devices are tracked in Google Analytics. While we get plenty of device information for other brands, Apple has (perhaps intentionally) made it difficult to detect and track iPhone models. Read more →
Do not use UTM tracking codes on internal links! I just wanted to get that out the way. And if you don’t read anything else in this post, that should be your main takeaway. But if you would like to know how to properly track internal links with Google Analytics, then read on!
Why track internal links? Well, first: What are internal links? Internal links are just that. They are links on your website that point to other pages on your website. Read more →
A client of mine recently asked me to track ‘mouse interaction’ with an iframe that they embed on several pages. By ‘mouse interaction’, the client basically meant that they would like to track whenever users hovered their mouse cursor over the iframe for a certain amount of time. I’ve previously posted that you can track any mouse or keyboard interactions with Google Analytics. As long as they occur within the browser. Read more →
The Campaign URL Builder for Google Analytics is a free tool. It lets you build URLs by appending certain parameters to your existing landing page URLs. In turn, this lets you track inbound traffic from marketing campaigns in Google Analytics on a detailed level. Ultimately, you’re better equipped to analyse the performance of campaigns. And you’re able to do so on a per marketing channel basis.
Let’s say you’re running a Winter 2016 Sale. Read more →
The Time on Page metric is probably one of the most misunderstood metrics in Google Analytics. Google Analytics measures the time on page for each page, but can only do so by measuring the elapsed time between two interactions. The first interaction is the timestamp of the initial pageview, and the second interaction is usually the timestamp for the next pageview (or an event). So for sessions with just one pageview (i. Read more →