Make Analytics Better with Tag Management and a Data Layer

Use a data layer to store page data on every site page.

There’s something new in the world of tracking: the container tag. It’s more commonly known as Tag Management. You may have heard of it over the last year or so. Very quickly this technology has spawned a number of companies and investment in this area. Some of the more well known tag management tools are [...]

Advanced Content Tracking with Google Analytics: Part 1

Do people actually read content?

This is part 1 of a two part series on advanced content tracking. This post is about why you might want to use this technique and how to implement. The next post will cover the reporting and analysis. The default content tracking content in Google Analytics is fairly straight forward. Using the standard page tag [...]

5 Google Analytics Custom Variables for Ecommerce

Custom Variables for Ecommerce

I believe that every business can use Google Analytics custom variables. Especially ecommerce businesses. Custom variables inject new data dimensions that are crucial for segmentation. As analysts we need to do segmentation to understand user behavior. And ecommerce sites have certain unique behaviors that are not tracked with a basic Google Analytics implementation. For those [...]

Mastering Google Analytics Custom Variables

Google Analytics Custom Variable Dimensions

I’ve got a stack of posts that I want to write, and realized that the all deal with Custom Variables. So, to make sure that we’re all on the same page when it comes to custom vars, here’s my guide to Mastering Google Analytics Custom Variables. For those of you that have not used custom [...]

Merging Google Analytics with your Data Warehouse

Designing your data warehouse.

Many of the projects that I’ve been working on over the last 6 to 9 months have evolved to include more and more data integration. Specifically companies are looking to import more Google Analytics data into other systems to do various types of analysis. Data integration is nothing new, companies have been doing it for [...]

Faster, Better, Stronger. The GA Async Tracking Code

You could wait for ga.js to load!

You may have heard that Google will begin to use site speed when calculating web rankings. This generated a lot of buzz, but according to Matt Cutts, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in [...]

Tracking Internal Campaigns with Google Analytics

Internal ticket sale campaign on RedSox.com

Internal campaigns are marketing efforts that are run on your site and promote your products and services. Here’s an example from the Boton Red Sox site. They’re using ads on the homepage to promote ticket sales. Companies should track how people react to these campaigns and which ones are most successful. But what’s the best [...]