Entries by Joshua Hill

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 […]

Using GTM to Track 4xx & 5xx Errors in Google Analytics

Recently I was with a client, browsing around their website to review some new content, and we ran across a “500 – Internal Server Error” warning on one of the most important pages. (That means their server encountered an error that prevented it from successfully serving the page.) None of us were aware of this, […]