One of the most widely reproduced charts I’ve ever made is a super simple one showing all of the different ways that GA can be blocked (from my old article on GA blocking, circa 2017): I thought I’d do a short article on where this stands in 2024. Data from the Chrome Web […]
The cookies are dying! Run for the hills! Save yourselves! Third party cookies (3PCs) are one of the most covered topics in digital marketing right now, yet somehow still remain one of the most confusing. Let’s start with some quick facts: Chrome is the only major browser that doesn’t heavily restrict 3P cookies already. Google […]
by Jason Packer with contributions from Juliana Jackson People in our field of analytics come from lots of different backgrounds. It’s such a common trope that we don’t generally think about this fact. Sometimes, people regret this, like, “Oh, I wish I had started in analytics earlier in my career so I knew more about […]
Private browsing modes have been around in browsers since Safari 2.0 in 2005, but are topic of interest again among analysts as browsers in general — and Safari especially — have started enforcing more tracking protections when users are in Private Mode. With Safari 17, users in Private Mode may simply disappear from your analytics. […]
There are a lot of reasons your GA4 data may not line up with expectations, but one of the most confusing is HyperLogLog++ (HLL++) cardinality estimation, which is used to estimate user counts. This estimation algorithm shows up in the GA4 UI for all counts, whether they are flagged as “sampled” or not, but will […]
Me: “Can you give me any advice on self-publishing?” Paul: “So — have you written the book yet?” Me: “Umm, yea.” Paul: “Well, there goes my biggest piece of advice.” I had this conversation with my good friend Paul back in September of 2022, when I was trying to figure out how to turn my […]
“We value your privacy…”, the clichéd beginning of many a privacy notice. I legitimately do value my own online privacy, and whenever I read that phrase as part of a website consent banner it sounds like lip service at best. Consent banners ostensibly exist to give users control over their data & personal privacy. Far […]
“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….” If you’ve ever wondered exactly how long ago and how far away this iconic opening line of Star Wars means, you’re in good company among analysts. A desire for for specificity and the need to quantify everything are hallmarks of the trade. Aren’t all galaxies […]
Let’s set the scene. It’s July 1996, and I’m holed up in a small Michigan Avenue office psyching myself up for my first ever internet startup all-nighter. I’m a college student working for a small company that does online restaurant reservations in Chicago; un-creatively yet descriptively called “Reservations On-Line”. It’s 8 or 9pm, I’ve filled […]
When considering any sort of site speed optimization effort, the big question is “will this actually help the bottom line?”. Those of us that enjoy site speed optimization (yes, we exist) might say that you should always just be making the site faster — make it as fast as you can! But we know there’s […]
