I’ve been posting on this site for almost three years. The entire site has been running on WordPress from the beginning. I chose WordPress because it’s really easy and I’m really comfortable with PHP.
But as time goes you often realise your actual needs. WordPress is a powerful CMS. For one, there are tonnes of themes (I mostly use the Genesis framework) and plugins. It’s very extensible and the many hooks and filters allow developers to customize the website to a very large degree. Read more →
A few months ago, I was invited to participate in the beta test of a new tool marketed as a virtual web analyst. Andrew Dempsey reached out to me and introduced me to Needl Analytics. I spent some time with the tool and had it analyze data for some of my clients, and I also spoke to Andrew about my experience with the tool and my suggestions for improvements. While Needl Analytics isn’t perfect, it’s very impressive for a tool in the beta stage. 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 →
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 →
One of the fundamental configurations in Google Analytics is to setup Goals. Goals are what allows you to analyze your website’s ability to drive users to what you want them to do (i.e. their Goals). Basically, goals are the actions on your website that provide value for you and for your customers. In turn, you’ll use Goals and Goal Conversion Rate to analyze the performance of e.g. your paid traffic channels. 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 →
You’re probably familiar with the All Pages report in Google Analytics. This report tells you basic data about all of your pages. Things such as the number of entrances (landings), exit rate, bounce rate and so on. But the two first metrics - Pageviews and Unique Pageviews - often lead to confusion. Because, what’s the difference between Pageviews and Unique Pageviews?
This is a really short post since the answer is simple. 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 →
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 →