Get SEO Data with the Google Custom Search JSON API

The Google Custom Search JSON API is primarily designed for creating applications that retrieve and display search results programmatically, like a search box widget that you place on your own website. However, as part of this service, Google provides a free Google Search API that that lets you query Google's search engine to check search ... Read more

Troubleshoot FB Pixel Errors Affecting Delivery

In Facebook Ads Manager, you may come across an error message banner stating "Pixel Error Affecting Delivery • An error with your Facebook pixel may be affecting the delivery of one or more of your ad sets. You can troubleshoot this error in Events Manager." This post will describe the steps you can take to ... Read more

Remove fbclid Parameter from GA Reports

In late 2018, Facebook began appending "fbclid" query strings to the ends of all outbound URLs originating from Facebook's site. These URLs take the format &fbclid=IwAR0Ylspg9Zo1-4JLuy5L3N7RhNTHg5BETDMlsQkUST8QC1JCo3iC6-54_PQ, and are appended to all outbound content, both FB ads as well as organic posts. This post will show you how to remove this parameter from your Google Analytics ... Read more

[Solution] An error occured while the tag was fired: net :: ERR_ABORTED

Google's Tag Assistant plugin is a great tool for troubleshooting various Google tags like Google Analytics, Google AdWords, and Google Tag Manager; just install and navigate to your site to enable checks for hundreds of issues. This post will describe how to fix a couple of the most common issues reported by the Tag Assistant ... Read more

Track FB Ads in GA with URL Dynamic Parameters

September 2018 Update: URL Dynamic Parameters are back! May 2018 Update: It looks like this feature has been (temporarily?) disabled by Facebook, at least for some accounts. There's discussion online about it not working anymore, and information on these dynamic parameters has been edited out from the official documentation. The original article is still presented ... Read more

Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Misunderstood Metrics #3: Direct Traffic (or how someone did not actually type in a URL 280 characters long) Here’s a question I got that represents much of the confusion around direct traffic. In my direct traffic report I’m seeing many deep page links receiving visits from direct traffic.  I heard that people bookmarking the page and ... Read more

Track Vanity URLs Using Redirects

This post shows how to set up 301 redirects to track vanity URLs in analytics tools like Google Analytics and IBM Digital Analytics (Coremetrics). This will ensure marketing query strings are appended to the destination page, so that marketing sources can be correctly tracked. Vanity URLs for Marketing Adding tracking parameters to URLs is an ... Read more

How to Track Bing Ad Keywords in Google Analytics

Update: in 2014, Bing enabled auto-tagging: https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/post/june-2014/auto-tagging-of-destination-urls-in-bing-ads. So this old post is only for reference, to remember how hard things used to be 😀 When Google Analytics tracks traffic coming in, it looks at the referring URL structure to determine if it is a search engine. This referring URL looks something like https://www.google.com/search?q=analytics&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a. By comparing this ... Read more