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 […]
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 […]
If you have a Google Analytics account you’ve probably recently been frustrated by the amount of spam showing up with bogus referrers, events, and other junk data. Referral spam in web analytics reports has been around for a long time, but it only started showing up in Google around the end of 2014. Google is working on […]
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 […]
Recently while looking at some AdWords conversion data a friend and I were discussing how to present acquisition costs to a client. We knew that PPC was contributing more than just what was showing in the basic Google Analytics reports, but weren’t sure what the best way to present the value assisted conversions to the […]
If you’re dealing with a high traffic site or doing reports in Google Analytics over long periods of time you may have run into report sampling. Y’know, the yellow box: To me there’s 3 obvious questions when you see it: 1. Why is it happening? 2. What can I do about it? 3. Is it […]
