That’s the way you do it You play the guitar on the MTV That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it Money for nothing and your chicks for free So said Dire Straits in 1985. When I was a kid, I legitimately thought that the lyrics were “money for nothing and your checks for free”. […]
Every week, it seems like a new LLM model is released. AI experts and influencers start talking nearly immediately about what this particular new model excels at and why you might want to consider dropping whatever you’re using now and getting in on the new hotness. It’s very hard to know when this analysis is […]
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 […]
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’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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
