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UPDATE: this post from 2012 described the cookies used by "classic" Google Analytics (ga.js), which has now largely been replaced by Universal Analytics (analytics.js).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 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
