Universal Analytics data is disappearing in 3 days, on July 1, 2024. The only way to access this data in the future will be if it’s been exported to another 3rd party service or CSV files. Once I started thinking about exporting Universal Analytics data, it took me only a short time to decide to […]
An increasing number of states are rolling out their own privacy regulations. Each state’s legislation has its own specifics regarding who needs to comply and how to comply. This blog post starts a series in which I’ll break down these privacy laws across various states and explore their implications for using digital tools and platforms […]
The ability to seamlessly redirect web traffic from one domain to another is more than just a convenience—it’s a necessity for good SEO and usability. However, not all domain forwarding services are created equal. One service that consistently falls short is offered by GoDaddy. In this post, I’ll explain why GoDaddy’s domain forwarding doesn’t work, […]
Here’s a summary of the posts and news I found most interesting in January.
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 […]
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.
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 […]
This post was originally created on November 11, 2016, and updated on April 20, 2024. It previously provided instructions for setting up error tracking with custom error pages, Google Tag Manager, and Universal Analytics. However, things are a bit different today with Google Analytics 4, so I’ve edited this post significantly to reflect those updates. […]
After collecting data for The Worst Super Bowl Ever, I asked a bunch of other people in Boulder, CO what sort of analysis they’d like to see. The response was overwhelming: most people wanted to know who swore more — Broncos fans or Seahawks fans? This is a reasonable way to think about things, especially for those […]
Throughout the NCAA Tournament, my brother and I captured and analyzed all tweets that contained hashtags for the 64 participating teams (e.g., Arizona: #BearDown, Florida Gulf Coast: #FGCU, Indiana: #iubb, etc.). (A full listing of the hashtags along with our methodology is provided at the bottom of this post.) In total we captured over 5 million tweets […]