Audience targeting with Google Analytics Building audiences is by far one of the top features you can take advantage of in Google Analytics. First party audiences in GA not only let you target and re-market users in AdWords and DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM), but you can also use them to personalize the site experience with Google Optimize 360 or even… Read More
Configuring Accounts, Properties and Views in Google Analytics I get asked a lot of times how you should create and organize accounts, properties and views in Google Analytics, but I typically answer that with a lot of questions. The true answer is that there is no ‘one’ answer to the question. It all depends on your website(s)/app(s) structure and your business needs. In… Read More
Organic Search Dashboard for Google Data Studio Google announced today that is has added a new connector for Google Data Studio to pull in Google Search Console data. This is greatly helpful for smaller publishers like me who rely heavily on organic search to drive qualified traffic and others that want to compare their organic and paid search efforts. In this post, I… Read More
Integrating Square with Google Analytics For those of you that have read my blog before, you’ll know how much I enjoy integrating Google Analytics with 3rd party data sources for analysis beyond your typical website and mobile app behaviors. Earlier last year, I wrote a couple posts about extending Slackalytics in Google Analytics and this technique inspired me to… Read More
Google Optimize: A Step-By-Step Guide Just a couple months ago, Google announced the free version of Google Optimize, their newest product for running tests websites. If you haven’t signed up for the free version, it’s currently running in a closed beta and you can request access here. I was lucky enough to be granted access and the product truly meets… Read More
1 year later: My digital analytics blog 10,000 visits, 13,000 pageviews and 7,300 users later, my blog has now been going strong for a whole year now. Just a year ago, I decided to start my blog because I always had creative tracking solutions in my head, and I wanted to get them out there so I could contribute to everyday folks just like… Read More
Measure User Behavior With Google Analytics, Sheets and Data Studio The user ID feature in Google Analytics is a valuable one that all websites and mobile apps should use when tracking cross-device behavior, but what if you want to understand how specific users are behaving? For example, imagine that you have an internal mobile app where your user needs to login to access the app, and you… Read More
Google Tag Manager Container Template For Websites I have performed a lot of Google Tag Manager implementations for websites, and sometimes the most time consuming part can be getting your container up and running. Assuming I’m not running into any monthly hit limitations, I like to start out with a baseline of configurations by importing a GTM container template. This template contains all… Read More
Introducing Free Version of Google Data Studio Google made a number of announcements at their Google Performance Summit today, but one of the biggest was releasing Google Data Studio for all customers. This product was previously announced a couple months ago when Google released the Google Analytics 360 suite, but it was limited to 360 (Premium) customers. Now everyone has access… Read More
Getting Up To Speed With Google Analytics I commonly get the question: “How did you learn Google Analytics and what resources can I look at to get started?”. Well the route I took to learn Google Analytics was rather unconventional. It was 2008 and I was graduating school. Yes, what an awful time to be graduating in the midst of a recession. I… Read More