Articles on Google Analytics

Articles on Google Analytics setup, configuration, tracking, and reporting. Advanced setup configurations and advanced topics related web analytics.

A lightweight Google Analytics 4 integration

Lightweight Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 has been a let down in many aspects based on every discussion I’ve seen and had with professionals of all stripes – marketers, advertising specialists, CROs, GA professionals, online experimentation experts, etc. One of the less discussed issues it brought with it is the default heavyweight GTAG library integration it comes with. […] Read more…

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Analytics Toolkit to discontinue Google Analytics-related functionalities

Discontinuing Google Analytics Functionalities

Analytics Toolkit was conceived in 2012 as a set of tools that automate essential Google Analytics-related tasks and augment the GA functionalities in various ways. This goal was achieved in the years since with the release of over a dozen tools utilizing the Google Analytics API. These were accompanied by dozens of in-depth technical articles […] Read more…

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The Perils of Using Google Analytics User Counts in A/B Testing

Google Analytics User Data in AB Testing

(Updated Sep 2022 & Jan 2023 to include updated information about Google Analytics 4) Many analysts, marketers, product managers, UX and CRO professionals nowadays rely on user counts provided by Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or similar tools, in order to perform various statistical analyses. Such analyses may involve the statistical hypothesis tests and estimations part […] Read more…

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The Effect of Using Cardinality Estimates Like HyperLogLog in Statistical Analyses

This article will examine the effects of using the HyperLogLog++ (HLL++) cardinality estimation algorithm in applications where its output serves as input for statistical calculations. A prominent example of such a scenario can be found in online controlled experiments (online A/B tests) where key performance measures are often based on the number of unique users, […] Read more…

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Top 10 ways to ruin your Google Analytics data and how to avoid them

No Pulse - No Data

A lot of businesses rely on Google Analytics to assess the performance of their online efforts with regards to online sales, marketing, support, or just providing users with information about a brand or a product. Any measurements and conclusions based on them, however, are only as good as the accuracy and reliability of the data […] 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…

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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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Guide to Calculated Metrics in Google Analytics

New Calculated Metric

A long awaited and quite awesome feature is finally here in open beta for all Google Analytics accounts: Calculated Metrics! As a long-time power user I’ve been longing for this for quite some time since I had to resort to spreadsheets or API-based solutions (like our Agency Dashboard tool) when I needed to calculate my own […] Read more…

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