This is a followup to the post on debugging Coremetrics without TagBar. In that post we walked through how to access and understand the query strings that get sent to Coremetrics servers while a user clicks around a website. These query strings populate the tags that get set on each page to identify user actions. … 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
In Coremetrics you can analyze specific kinds of visitors by applying Report Segments. For example, you can make a segment for visitors from a certain marketing channel or who made a certain kind of purchase. I like using Report Segments because you can browse nearly the full set of standard reports for your segment, while … 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
HTTP SNIFFING FOR WEB ANALYSTS – WHY? As web analysts we need to be able to see and test the technical details of tags, so that we know exactly how the data is being collected. For Coremetrics, however, one thing that can be difficult about viewing and debugging tags is that the official Coremetrics tag … Read more
2017 UPDATE: this post from 2012 described the cookies used by “classic” Google Analytics (ga.js), which has now largely been replaced by Universal Analytics (analytics.js). While the old version of GA stored information client-side in user cookies, Universal Analytics instead uses just a single cookie to store a user ID, and then processes all the … Read more
This is a tip specific for Coremetrics. Frequently you want to understand where traffic to a specific page came from. You see a spike in page views and want to understand it, you suspect a blog post may be sending traffic, etc. There’s no default report in the Coremetrics Analytics interface that shows you this, so … Read more
During a web analytics implementation (or audit), you need to check whether the data is being collected as planned. You can do that as follows: The Basics: View Source Code To identify whether basic code is on the page, you can often visit the site > right-click> View Source. Here I’ll use popular Q&A site Quora.com … Read more
During a web analytics implementation, or while tracking down the source of tracking errors, it’s important to check what’s being sent to the analytics servers. Coremetrics provides 3 ways to debug or QA an implementation: 1) The Coremetrics TagBar. This is the everyday staple of QA’ing. It’s an Internet Explorer/Firefox browser plug-in that shows … Read more
