How to Use Google Sheets Pivot Tables in Data Studio
I work in spreadsheets a lot. It’s still the best way to easily slice and dice small data sets. I’ve been using Google Sheets for most of my spreadsheets for several years, but it has limits. The two biggest are memory and power, and they’ve forced me to keep a few grotesquely large spreadsheets in Excel. Another limitation to Google Sheets that I’ve experienced a lot recently is that you can’t edit row 1 of pivot tables.
How to Stop Russians from Grinding Axes in Analytics
Google Analytics has a “ghost spam” issue lately and one really annoying Russian is responsible for most of it. I’ve read through buckets of posts from Analytics professionals about how to deal with this tomfoolery. I’d like to share a few of the resources and provide some commentary.
How to Setup Analytics & GTM for Dev/Prod
Let’s say you’re launching a significant update to a website. A lot is changing: the theme, lots of URLs, maybe the CMS or backend, and so forth. And the team creating the website is working from various IP addresses on the development site. What’s the best way to handle the transition with Analytics?
Lately (after having a website launch without Analytics earlier this year) I’ve been handling this in a very particular way, and I’ve grown to really like it. Basically, I’m using hostnames (dev.domain.com, www.domain.com, etc.) in Google Tag Manager to automatically split traffic to different Analytics properties. I’m doing this by using a “lookup table” for my Analytics IDs (instead of using a “constant” variable).