“We value your privacy…”, the clichéd beginning of many a privacy notice. I legitimately do 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 data & personal privacy. Far […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
