Don’t Get Greedy With Regex

by Ben Tortora on December 15, 2009

For many web traffic analysts, most would have some great skills in analysing and crunching numbers and data, generating pretty graphs and reports, as well as some marketing insights on how to take action. However one skill that might have been so prevalent is the ability to generate Regular Expressions (or regexs as they are known in the developer world). In fact, many first time programmers struggle with generating them properly.

With Google’s goal conversion and filtering now all being able to accept regexs all over the place, it is a skill all analytics people should have up their sleave, rather than running to the dev team. [click to continue…]

{ 3 comments }

Google Analytics is Faster

by Ben Tortora on December 3, 2009

This post is probably a little bit more technical and on the programming side than others on this blog. It’s because of the fact that now your Google Analytics code won’t be blocking the rendering of the rest of your website. It does this by loading the code asynchronously. Find out the benefits of this by reading the full post. [click to continue…]

{ 1 comment }

Using GA to find out Ranking History

by Ben Tortora on November 17, 2009

Today I was doing some analysis for a particular client that was suffering from some keyword cannabilisation and we needed to work out how to overcome the problem. I wanted to do some analysis on the page’s history as they had quite a lot of historical analytics data. I actually stumbled across a handy little report that I thought would benefit the wider community, especially when you are working with your SEO strategists. [click to continue…]

{ 2 comments }

Google Analytics Gets Clever

by Ben Tortora on November 6, 2009

So as I am sure all of you are well aware, Google Analytics is in the process of rolling out a whole stack of new features throughout all there users, with the major pitch towards it being “intelligent.” And I for one am finally glad that we can pivot on data and do some crazy analysis, bending and twisting it in ways unimaginable even for a European gymnast. What we will do now is go through each of them and I’ll give my thoughts on how I plan to use them. [click to continue…]

{ 6 comments }

When Things are Not Set

by admin on October 8, 2009

One of the most confusing things for people once they begin to use analytics and really start to drill down into the data is seeing entries or information where Google Analytics displays that it isn’t quite too sure what is going on. So in this post I will highlight some of the ones I commonly see and offer a brief explanation on how to interpret the data. [click to continue…]

{ 0 comments }

Tag Your Visitors With Cookie Hacks

If you haven’t already noticed, I have been researching quite a bit regarding hacking up the standard Google Analytics code, specifically how cookies are set, in order to further refine the data that you are collecting. This week was inspired off a post from the Official Google Analytics Blog outlining a few tips regarding adding [...]

Continue Reading..

Whose Reading Your Whole Blog Post?

Most blogs that I read/visit regularly have only a snippet or extract about the post on the homepage or its series of archives. This I feel is a great idea because it allows me to read a sentence or two before I decide to progress. However, what I have always wondered is what the click [...]

Continue Reading..

Google Analytics Cookies Lie

Over the last few weeks I have been going through the nitty gritty of the actual Javascript that is used by Google Analytics. And what I have found regarding how the Google Analytics Cookies work has shocked me. I cannot believe there hasn’t been more of an uproar about it on the Internet. When I [...]

Continue Reading..

3 Great Analytics Education Websites

For most businesses, having a dedicated, inhouse analytics specialist would not be a cost effective exercise. And whilst I am the first to promote that as many resources as possible should be put towards online marketing, website development and analysis, most businesses will never take those steps. So where does that leave you in your [...]

Continue Reading..

What Is Skewing Your Data

Most analytics professionals will tell you almost immediately that there is no such thing as 100% accurate website traffic data. And they would be perfectly correct in saying so. However, there are many tasks and everyday type browsing that would be skewing the results to appear more successful than they actually are. I will outline [...]

Continue Reading..