Author Archives: Georgi Georgiev

5 Reasons to Go Bayesian in AB Testing – Debunked

Frequentist vs Bayesian A/B Testing

As someone who spent a good deal of time on trying to figure out how to run A/B tests properly and efficiently, I was intrigued to find a slide from a presentation by VWO®’s data scientist Chris Stucchio, where he goes over the main reasons that caused him and the VWO® team to consider and […] Read more…

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The Bane of AB Testing: Reaching Statistical Significance

Illusory Results AB Testing

Now, this is not a new topic on this blog. I’ve discussed the issue of optional stopping based on “achieving” or “reaching” statistical significance in my Why Every Internet Marketer Should be a Statistician post more than two years ago and others have touched on it as well – both before and after me. However, the issue […] Read more…

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Bayesian AB Testing is Not Immune to Optional Stopping Issues

Fantasy vs real world in bayesian ab testing

Fantasy vs the Real World: Naive Bayesian AB Testing vs Proper Statistical Inference This post is addressed at a certain camp of proponents and practitioners of A/B testing based on Bayesian statistical methods, who claim that outcome-based optional stopping, often called data peeking or data-driven stopping, has no effect on the statistics and thus inferences […] Read more…

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Future-Proofing Against Google Analytics Spam

A Spammer's View of the GA Home Report

Some two years after it gained prominence Google Analytics spam is all the rage again with one or several notorious spammers finding their way into hundreds of thousands of Google Analytics accounts in order to bring attention to stuff the spammer or his/her associates are making money off. The new wave started around Nov 8, […] Read more…

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Language Spam – The Latest Google Analytics Spam

Google Analytics Homepage Spam

In the past 2 weeks we are witnessing a new wave of Google Analytics Spam – language spam and in this post I’ll outline what it is, how it happens and how you can protect your GA accounts from it (to some extent). We first started seeing it on Nov 8, just as the 2016 […] Read more…

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Get Your Google Analytics Tracking Code & ID and Check Your Setup

Google Analytics Tracking Code 2

OK, so you’ve decided that you’d start tracking your site with Google Analytics. Or you were given the task to install Google Analytics tracking on a site. In both cases you need to start by logging into a Google account (not necessarily a Gmail one), accepting the Google Analytics terms of service and then creating […] Read more…

Posted in Google Analytics |

Using Content Groupings for User Flow Analysis in Google Analytics

Order Chaos Content Groupings

In the first part of this article we talked about how to set up content groupings in Google Analytics and how to make sure it’s working as expected. In this part we’ll discuss the 4 main benefits of having content groupings defined. If I have to sum it up in one word, I would go with […] Read more…

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Setting up Content Groupings in Google Analytics

Planning

It’s been 2 years since content groupings first made it into Google Analytics, but it seems like this incredibly beneficial feature is still quite underused and poorly understood even among people otherwise familiar with the software. That’s why I decided to write a two-part guide of which you’re reading the first one – how to setup […] Read more…

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Google Analytics Spam & What To Do About It

Google Analytics Spam

It’s now 2016 and Google Analytics Spam is on the rise again. Following the holidays many webmasters and site owners opened Google Analytics, only to see something like this: Namely, their source/medium stats are once again polluted with irrelevant referral spam. The new “star” on the block is definitely с.новым.годом.рф, while the .xyz TLD continues to […] Read more…

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What is (direct) / (none) source in Google Analytics? Understanding direct traffic.

Direct Traffic

When I do a seminar or a training (I am Google Regional Trainer in AdWords & Analytics) direct traffic is often one of the tougher things for the audience to understand. My audience is usually comprised of digital marketers, SEOs, AdWords specialists, and SMB owners so IT/web development background is relatively rare. That’s why when asked […] Read more…

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Google Analytics Referral Spam Explained in 5 minutes – Infographic

The infographic below is our 5 minute guide to Google Analytics referrer spam. In it we cover what’s the effect of spam on your stats & reports, why does it happen, how exactly does it happen and what are 4 main approaches to dealing with it. The infographic contains descriptions of the two ways referral […] Read more…

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How to Fix Ghost Traffic / Spam Traffic in Google Analytics

Stop Referrer Spam

Since my last posts on how to eliminate Ghost Referrer Spam in Google Analytics & Google Analytics data integrity attacks two things have happened: 1. The number of people complaining about spam referrers / spam events / spam pageviews in webmaster forums and Google Groups have increased exponentially 2. The Google Analytics team noted on their Google Plus […] Read more…

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