If you're interested in excluding dynamic IP addresses, I suggest following the steps in this article. However, if you want something faster or less involved, this article contains 2 super easy methods to exclude your own internal traffic from Google Analytics when you have a dynamic IP address or are using your mobile data network. ... Read more
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
Misunderstood Metrics #4: Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate This post explains the difference between two misunderstood metrics: bounce rate and exit rate. Both of these metrics are used to understand how people are using your site, but bounce rate broadly indicates how well your site meets viewer expectations, while exit rate shows what pages were ... Read more
Misunderstood Metrics #2: Sessions Per Page Sessions are a standard metric throughout Google Analytics. But one place you don’t see them is in the Content > Pages report. Here, instead, you’ll see Pageviews and Unique Pageviews. Many enterprising users therefore try to get around this by creating their own custom report containing Page as ... Read more
Misunderstood Metrics #1: GA Attribution (or how someone came to your site today from that email you sent out 4 months ago) GA does a great job of making web data accessible and intuitive but there are a few dimensions and metrics that tend to trip up users, including marketing sources. Users visit your site ... Read more
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
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
For the past few years we've seen increasing numbers of content and ecommerce sites come together into some kind of hybrid. Online magazines hunting for new revenue streams add event tickets and product guides with click-to-buy functionality, while retailers looking to build engagement add blogs and editorial features. While the logic behind these approaches make ... Read more
Setting a time frame in reporting is usually where any kind of analysis starts. You need to view trends over time, or compare to some time prior periods as a benchmark. I personally like to get tons of metrics -- visits, revenue, conversion rate, etc -- all laid out by day or even hour ... Read more
Updated: Feb 26, 2013 I'm frequently asked about the big three web analytics tools: Google Analytics, Omniture, and Coremetrics. While the question is frequently posed as "which one is the best?" I also hear "how are they different?" So in that spirit I'm putting them head to head and giving my honest and quite comprehensive ... Read more
