Did you ever feel that the Website Retargeting in the LinkedIn Campaign Manager is just too simple? And have you wished for more advanced targeting options based on your first party data? I, for one, have long wished for targeting options like those in Facebook’s Ads Manager. When it comes to website retargeting, Facebook lets you define audiences based on not only URLs, but also any custom events you might want to use. Read more →
One full year as a freelance digital consultant just flew by. Yeah, I began the year calling myself an analytics freelancer. But I ended up doing much more than that. I know. I’ve been there. I even saved enough money before quitting my job to go six months unpaid. So far, I’ve been working on so many interesting things. Like data strategy as a whole. Ecommerce strategy. Customer Data Platforms. Teaching and speaking. Read more →
If you’re a regular visitor on this (and because I use Google Analytics, I know some of you are!), you might have noticed I haven’t posted anything for like three months. But I have an excuse. I’ve been insanely busy. Well, I’ve been busy for years. But this time around, it was kind of my own fault. Back in September 2017, I actually quit my job as Head of Data Intelligence in iProspect. Read more →
This weekend, I bought a new laptop. I went for a sleek Lenovo IdeaPad 710s Plus with a 256 GB SSD harddrive, lots of memory and a dedicated graphics card. But getting a new computer made me realize just how much software I’m actually using. As an ecommerce consultant, the entire software stack of the digital marketer is actually quite comprehensive. I even had a hard time remembering what to install. Read more →
… you ask a fellow passenger in the lift to “Please click the number five button” … you once in a while click a banner ad just for fun; and upon seeing the landing page, realizes that no one apparently had thought of that ever happening … you feel the need to optimize the way hotel buffets are ‘layouted’ every time you’re on vacation … you try to segment people on the train in different user buckets by age, gender and clothing style … you’re amazed how fast (and unsecure! Read more →
If you’re a regular visitor on this site, you might have noticed that I’ve been running a poll to ask visitors about their preferred heatmapping tool for mouse and click tracking. Now, a heatmap tool is a great companion for Google Analytics. Because, while Google Analytics often tell us where something goes wrong, it doesn’t really tell us the actual problem. This is when a heatmap tool offers some more qualitative data. Read more →
Implementation and auditing of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager is essential when working with web analytics. After all, what good are reporting and analytics if you can’t trust your data? Usually, when setting up GTM and Analytics on a website, you’ll find yourself checking source code for the correct dataLayer or using real-time reports to see if data comes in. But Chrome Extensions for Google Analytics and Tag Manager makes it much easier. 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 data analysts and web analysts of today are not just required to do reporting and relay data in simple charts and tables. True web analysis is about answering business critical questions and come up with intelligent answers. It’s about delivering real value based on insights derived from data. And it has a lot to do with recommending specific actions or to qualify discussions and planning in marketing and sales. I’ve thought about the most important skills of great web analysts for some time. Read more →
So lately, I’ve been learning to use R with Google Analytics using R Studio. I’m just a couple of weeks in, but so far it has proven just amazing. By combining R with the Google Analytics Core Reporting API, it’s possible to do analysis, calculations and statistics much faster and deeper than using the Google Analytics interface or even add-ons to import Google Analytics data into Excel. Since R is script based, all analyses are automatically documented - and they’re easily reusable. Read more →