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 […]
December 2017 update (blocking levels down some). June 2016 update (blocking levels a little higher). There’s now a significant number of users that use ad-blockers, estimated at about 15% in the US (according to PageFair), and that number grew quickly in 2015. Extensions like AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and Ghostery are incredibly popular (#1, #4, and #6 amongst the […]
UPDATE Nov 2019: After 3+ years of running this service I’ve decided to stop running it, as this kind of spam is pretty rare now and not worth the maintenance from my side or the user’s side. Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback and helped ID spammers! If you have a Google Analytics account […]
Thank you everyone who came to my talk at WordCamp. Here are my slides: Though if you missed the talk it may be easier to follow along with the original hack cleanup guide it was based upon. Please feel free to reach out with any follow-up comments or questions you might have, and see you next time!
So you’ve been hacked, now what?? In my last post on WordPress security, “How Secure is WordPress“, I suggested hiring a professional ASAP when you’ve been hacked. I’m sticking with that advice — especially if your site is important to your business, better to let someone that has experience cleaning up these kind of messes take care […]
Update July 2018: I have developed a method for supporting DNT in Google Analytics. You may have seen the “Do Not Track” option in your browser — perhaps you even have it set to “On” yourself, but do you know how many of your users have it set? “Do Not Track” is a simple HTTP request header […]
Let’s face it, WordPress is a big target for hackers. It’s used by a huge number of sites, powering > 20% of all websites by many estimates. Builtwith reports 20% of their sample of 1.7M sites use WordPress, including 11% of the top 10k sites. Anyway you slice it — that’s a lot of sites, and […]
