Google Analytics

How to Add Web Vitals to Google Analytics and Reveal a New Search Ranking Signal

Google recently announced an upcoming shift in how website performance will affect search ranking starting in 2021. Moving forward, there will be additional emphasis on a series of metrics called the Core Web Vitals which focus on how users perceive the responsiveness of your website. These vitals address a major flaw in how website performance was measured historically. Older metrics like “page weight” described specific networking or computing resources that might be taxed, but didn’t directly describe the degree to which those bottlenecks affected users. Consequently, it was difficult to ascertain what a “good” page weight might be, beyond the conventional wisdom of smaller is better.

In this article, I’ll show you how you can incorporate core web vitals into Google Analytics. If you’re just looking for the GTM tags and triggers to accomplish this, you can download them here.

Google Analytics

Market Basket Analysis using Google Analytics Data

Ever since I learned about Market Basket Analysis, my head was spinning with ideas on how it could be applied to web data. To back up for a second, Market Basket Analysis (MBA), is a data mining technique that catalogs the strength in relationships between combinations of items placed together during a transaction. Applications often include:

• Recommending content in the form of “Users who view X and Y also view Z”
• Offering promotions for combinations of items to increase revenue
• Better understanding of user behavior and intent
• Updating editorial decisions based on popular combinations of items

Google Analytics

Introducing Differential Scroll Tracking with GTM

One of the benefits of being a freelance analyst is that I have access to dozens of different client instances of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. One common implementation I find is scroll tracking. Whether through a custom plug-in or GTM’s out of box tracking, clients often implement events that look like this:

Google Analytics

How to Add GA Segments to Google Data Studio Reports

**Update: Google Data Studio now includes native support for GA Segments. The post below may still be relevant if you are looking to combine data from multiple sources into a single Data Studio report /Update**

Ever since Google released Data Studio in mid-2016, I’ve received a lot of interest from clients who find its data visualization and data sharing capabilities much easier to grasp than the standard Google Analytics reports. However, anyone who has put together a Data Studio report has noticed that its simplicity is both its strength and weakness. You can easily create visually compelling reports in minutes, but it lacks the sophistication of more feature-rich tools such as Tableau. One missing feature that I’ve seen users complain about is its lack of support for GA Segments. Fortunately, with the Google Sheets connector and Google Analytics add-on for Sheets we’re able to work around this limitation. Note that this same process works (and is slightly easier) with Supermetrics, but I’ll demonstrate my solution with the GA add-on for Sheets because it’s free.

Read More

Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics to Predict Clicks and Speed Up Your Website

Google Analytics holds a trove of information regarding the path that each user takes on your website. It’s not a leap, then, to imagine using past user behavior to predict the path that a current user will take on your website. What if we could use these predictions to download and render assets before the user requests them? Thanks to the HTML5 prerender command, we can! In this post I’ll discuss how creative applications of Google Analytics, R, Google Tag Manager, and the HTML5 prerender hint were used to create a snappier browsing experience for users of www.targit.com.

Read More

Google Analytics

Google Analytics Autotrack.js Updated – See What’s New

On August 2nd, Google announced the release of an updated and much improved autotrack.js plug-in that solves many common challenges that people face when implementing Google Analytics. One major change is that the autotrack library is broken out into 9 different discrete plug-ins that can be included in your solution independently of one another through the “Require” command. While there is thorough documentation from Google, I couldn’t find a nice concise description of each plug-in so I’ve provided that here.

Read More

Google Analytics

Google Analytics “Direct” traffic is “Unknown” traffic

While listening to an interview with an analytics vendor the other day, I heard a phrase that is too often repeated and can be summarized as “… we flag users as highly engaged when they type your website address directly into your browser”. The problem with this statement is nuanced but will become clear in a second.

Read More

Google Analytics

Deploying autotrack.js through Google Tag Manager

*autotrack.js has been updated! See this post for more information*

Just 2 days ago, the Google Analytics team released a plug-in called autotrack that packs a lot of new functionality into Google Analytics. The thinking behind autotrack is that far too many clients deploy the default GA snippet and stop there. By packaging up advanced GA tracking capabilities into one, easily deployed plug-in, clients will gain more value out of their GA account. These tracking capabilities include:

• Event Tracking – Track when users click on any HTML element with a certain data attribute
• Media Query Tracking – Track breakpoints, orientation, and resolution
• Outbound Form Tracking – Track when users submit forms that land them off-site
• Outbound Link Tracking – Track when users click on an outbound link
• Session Duration Tracking – More accurately track the duration of sessions by firing an event when the user closes their browser window
• Social Button Tracking – Track when users click on social sharing buttons
• URL Change Tracking – Track when the URL changes but the page does not refresh (important for single page applications)

While utilizing these enhancements goes beyond a “beginner” understanding of GA, by packaging them up in this easy-to-use plug-in it brings them from the clouds and into the hands of anyone with a basic understanding of GA and HTML.

Read More