Entries by Joshua Hill

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The Colorado Privacy Act (CPA) & Google Analytics 4

This post is the second in a series where I examine details related to different digital privacy laws in various states and explain how they influence the use of standard 3rd party tools such as Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads. You can view all posts here. I’ll update these posts as legislation and best […]

Use Looker Studio to Export Universal Analytics Data

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 […]

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California’s Privacy Law & Google Analytics 4

An increasing number of states are rolling out digital privacy regulations. Each state’s legislation has different 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 from different states and explore their implications for using digital tools and platforms such as […]

Domain Forwarding: Overcoming GoDaddy’s Limitations

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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Using GA4 to Report on 4xx & 5xx Errors

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. […]

The Profanity Bowl: #$*@ On Twitter During Super Bowl 2014

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 […]