Over the past couple of weeks I have presented at a few conferences (SummitUp in Dayton, Ohio and UnSummit in Salt Lake City, Utah) on the topic of People, Process, and Platform. Now, before you roll your eyes because you’ve heard it all before, let me let you know that you won’t be getting my…
Business vs Marketing Analyst – Roles, Skillsets & Career Paths
I was recently chatting with a young women who happens to be a senior at Chapman University in Southern California and is an aspiring analyst. She mentioned she had just been to New York for a school trip where she had learned a lot about financial analytics, and she asked me my thoughts on financial…
Step by Step: Outbound Link Tracking in Google Tag Manager
Following up on last week’s post on event tracking, I thought it would be a good idea to deep dive on outbound link tracking. Outbound link tracking is super easy to setup using Google Tag Manager and the insights you can gain by understanding the most common paths to leaving your website are definitely worth…
Events: Best Practices for Hierarchies and Naming Conventions
If you are looking to understand the actions that a user takes on your website, one of the best ways to do this is with event tracking. This can include (but not limited to): Link clicks (on site or outbound) Downloads (whitepaper, pdf, etc) Scrolling Load times In Google Analytics, event tracking is made up…
2014 Travel By The Numbers
Happy New Year! Wow, I can’t believe 2014 is already behind us, it really did FLY by… Ha.. see what I did there? 😉 2014 was a big year in travel for me, both professionally and personally. Given the data nerd that lives in my very core, I thought I’d throw together the numbers and…
Definitions of Common Analytics Terms
If you’re just starting out in analytics, you may find that there are a lot of new, confusing terms to master. Here is a short (but certainly not exhaustive) guide to what many of these mean: Hit: a hit is any server call that corresponds to the javascript firing on a webpage or app and…
Using a GTM Constant String Variable for GA Property ID
If you use Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, you’ll know that with every new analytics tag you create, you need to enter in your Google Analytics property ID (what’s a property ID?). If you are creating multiple tags, this can be a pain and can also lead to possible typos/errors that will cause your…
Enabling Pre-defined Variables in the New GTM UI
In GTM 2.0, macros have gone away. These are now called ‘Variables’. There are many pre-defined variables in GTM 2.0 which make setting up tags & triggers easier than before, however, you must first enable them. This is just a quick post to hopefully save you some time and energy the first time you try…
Step by Step: Setting Up a Google Analytics Dashboard
Do you need to look at the same metrics or report on a regular basis? Do you want to share the same report across a broader group of stakeholders? Do you want to have the flexibility to change the date range for the whole report or segment it down to certain demographics or characteristics? Great…