Have you ever tried to setup a filtered view in Analytics for a whole bunch of different URLs? Only to realise that your regex pattern for including those URLs exceeds the 128 character limit? Well, I have. And I’m happy to say that there’s a pretty good workaround.
Wait, what’s the problem here? There are several pros and cons for using URL filtered views. For example, sessions not starting on an included URL will be treated as direct traffic. Read more →
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 →
Why is it that Google Analytics is reporting different sales and conversion numbers than your website backend? If you run an ecommerce website or a website with lead forms, you’ve probably noticed that your ecommerce and goal reports show different numbers than your backend. And by backend I mean your systems behind the website.
For instance, you might run a WooCommerce og Shopify store (or any other type of webshop). Whenever you compare your sales numbers and revenue from Google Analytics with the numbers in your CMS, there’s almost always a difference. 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 →
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’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 →