“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 […]
It was surprisingly cold for April in Belgrade; later that week there would be sleet. I would’ve put on a heavier jacket or hat, but I didn’t have one. In fact I didn’t have any other clothes at all aside from the ones I was wearing, which I had been wearing for the last three […]
There are a few questions that frequently come up in Google Analytics with respect to data processing: 1. “When will my data show up in GA”? 2. “When is yesterday’s data complete in GA”? 3. “Can I edit or remove data in GA?” And finally a slightly less commonly-asked question I am also looking to […]
Update Nov 1, 2017 Since I first published this article in July adoption of ads.txt has exploded, measuring as high as 44% measured on a different list but using the same crawler I used. This is great, and one of the big reasons for the growth into a sustainable standard is Google supporting checking ads.txt […]
The data quality in web analytics reports has long been a point of concern for analysts. These days we’re dealing with Google Analytics spammers, bots, and other noise in our reports, but the idea that web analytics reports are “just not quite right” has long been considered the norm. One of the reasons for this lack of […]
