So, looks like iOS 9 has built-in support for integrating “content blocking” extensions on your iPhone. Now, blocking ads and other intrusive content is nothing new, nor do I want to get into a debate about whether it’s a good thing or not. But as a data geek I’m very interested in knowing just what share of my site tracking has some content blocker enabled. In this post, I’ll show two tricks (easy and advanced) to expose these content blockers. Read More…
Here’s an interesting and hacky use case for you. It’s all about uncovering bounce metrics for visits which originate from organic Google search results. In particular, the metric we’re interested in is how long user dwelled on the landing page after arriving from organic Google search AND returned to the search engine results page (SERP) using the browser’s back button. The inspiration for this post came from an audience question at the Best Internet Conference in Lithuania, which I recently attended as a speaker. Read More…
Enhanced Ecommerce is undoubtedly an excellent feature of Google Analytics. It provides us with a set of reports that truly extend the capabilities of funnel-based website analysis. As I’ve shown before, it’s also very useful for tracking other transactional events on your site, such as content engagement. However, here’s the thing. It’s not very easy to implement. Even if you get everything right according to the documentation, there are still quite a number of pitfalls, and many of the learnings emerge only through experience. Read More…
Unfortunately, iFrames still exist. They are used to embed content from one page into another. Frames are horrible, nasty things, very often riddled with cross-domain problems, performance issues, responsive design obstructions and other crap from the nether pits of hell. Regardless, if you’re stuck with an iFrame which also collects data to your Google Analytics property, for example, you probably want to prevent at least the first Page View from firing, since otherwise you’ll be double-counting Page Views: once on the main page and once in the iFrame. Read More…
(Updated 13 August 2017) A little over a year ago, in April 2014, I wrote the post “Advanced Form Tracking In Google Tag Manager”, and it’s been at the top of my best seller list ever since. Turns out that many people are rightfully passionate about making the web forms on their websites as fluid and intuitive as possible, since a web form is often the only thing that stands between a prospect and their transformation into clienthood. Read More…
Maintaining the list of Referral Exclusions in Google Analytics admin is a pain. Especially if you have a webstore, the number of referral sources you need to exclude to avoid sessions being split can grow really fast. Also, it’s not like the list is has the most intuitive UI. Instead of a handy text area where you could just copy-paste stuff, you’re left with a horrible line-by-line list, and there’s no way of copying lists across properties or anything useful like that. Read More…
One of the glaring omissions in the Enhanced Ecommerce reports of Universal Analytics is the ability to calculate cart value for products. Cart value, here, is the value that has been added to the cart. This value can be used to query for products that have the highest discrepancy between cart value and generated revenue. These are missed opportunities of the highest caliber. With some Custom Metrics magic, we can, however, get cart value into our reports, and we can find our most and least “effective” products with just a glance: Read More…
According to their website, SoundCloud is “the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere”. For artists, it’s a channel for distributing previews of their tracks, and for people like me it’s a nice way to do some API tinkering. To each their own, I guess! I saw a number of requests in the Google+ Google Tag Manager community about a SoundCloud integration, so I decided to look into it to see if I could just build one. Read More…
Data is difficult. Growing a business is difficult. Measuring success is difficult. And you know what? They should be difficult. Otherwise we’d all be equally stupid, whereas now those of us ambitious enough to exert themselves are winning the race. And it’s not just working with data that’s difficult. The whole Web is a mess! Search engine optimization consultants, for example, are trigger-happy in doling out advice about server-side redirects without stopping to consider the implications of what they’re recommending. Read More…
Last weekend, I wrote a very simple web app that automatically creates a number of referral spam filters to tackle the problem that seems to have everybody all riled up. For a nice recap of the situation, take a look at this post by Jeff Sauer, or this article by Mike Sullivan. This isn’t an opinion piece, even though I’ve got a great number of opinions about this issue. Read More…