An API (Application Programming Interface) allows you to send and receive data from a remote server, like querying a database. This is helpful when you're building an app or pulling metrics for reporting, because it means you can focus on presenting information in a unique or useful manner, rather than developing the underlying data set. ... Read more
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
While Google Analytics provides many reports and metrics designed to evaluate the effectiveness of content marketing, there is no report showing the conversion rates of specific posts or pages on your site. For example, if you're tracking registrations on your site, you may want to know which specific posts are associated with signups, even if ... Read more
Google's online spreadsheet service, Google Sheets, allows users to install add-ons (aka plugins or extensions) for additional functionality. After making a little Google Sheets add-on of my own, Archive Data, I became curious about what add-ons are most popular. Through some web scraping I extracted a comprehensive list of all Google Sheets add-ons from the Sheets ... Read more
The free Google Sheets add-on Archive Data helps store snapshots of historical data in your Google Sheets reports and dashboards. It allows you to set a schedule to paste from row or column X to Y, automatically creating a record of your original data. Example:You have a monthly dashboard that uses the "Google Analytics spreadsheet add-on" ... Read more
Using regex to match specific numbers of sub-directories in a URL can be very helpful for Google Analytics. When I configure a new Google Analytics view, I'll usually set up Content Grouping so we can see traffic by page type rather than just to a specific page. Ideally there's a value in the data layer ... 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
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
