In 2008 as I was walking out of the door at Google, I predicted the next big thing in web analytics was privacy. Of course I was wrong, but it did come eventually in the form of the GDPR. And thank God for that. The wild west surveillance economy was getting out of hand.
My first Google Analytics data point was 15th May 2005. In this post I look back at what Universal Analytics did for the industry, including my own career, where GA4 fits in (or not), and what I think the future holds.
In theory, the Google Consent Mode is a great idea - it natively builds in consent control into your data collection set up. But there is a considerable flaw in Google's approach that in my view breaks privacy laws.
Cross domain tracking has always been difficult to get right in Google Analytics - and it still remains a challenge. This audit guide will help you get on top of it.
Excluding internal (i.e. your staff visits) from Google Analytics is an interesting challenge - it’s not as straightforward as you think. This is because there is no obvious way to identify a staff visit. Hence this detailed post showing a possible alternative.
Since GTM introduced an automatic way of tracking scroll depth in Google Analytics, there has been a proliferation of this tracking. In this post I explain why you should avoidsuch "noise" and avoid the cost implications.
These are my best tools, or "add-ons" I use when working with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. They focus on helping you get you get on top of and maintaining your data quality.
Part of my job involves the audit of Google Analytics setups in order to establish the quality of the data collected. This video story brings together some of the extraordinary findings of this work. It's a study of 75 enterprise websites using Google Analytics.
As with viewing any information containing charts, tables, diagrams etc. reading content in COLOUR is very important - its why Successful Analytics was printed in colour. However colour printing is expensive - so I need your feedback via this 2 second poll.
