There’s a lot of reasons why 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 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 privacy and how their data is used. […]
What’s the best alternative to Google Analytics? It’s a commonly asked question with no one “universal” answer for all cases. There are literally hundreds of potential alternatives to Google Analytics, but at the same time there is no single alternative that matches exactly what GA can do. While we might think of GA as being […]
“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 […]
If you’re running a GA account with anything much beyond the defaults, you probably have some kind of traffic exclusion filters on — I know I usually do! Do you have an unfiltered view that has no filters at all? If so, do you ever look in there? And when you do find some kind […]
I’ve long been a proponent of the “Do Not Track” (DNT) browser setting, including writing an article a few years ago on how to track how many users have DNT turned on. DNT is a simple signal sent in the header of all HTTP requests indicating that a user doesn’t want to be tracked. No […]
Did you know that your site probably serves up more pages to bots than humans? Unless you’re looking at a site with a high amount of users, that ratio could be quite tilted towards bots. This isn’t a bad thing, a lot of bots are crucial to to the functioning of sites and the internet […]
