Steve Fenton

Sometimes you need to see what’s going on under the hood of your analytics tracking. Google Analytics v4 (GA4) provides a simple way to debug your configuration either at the property level, or per-event. The DebugView screen The DebugView can be found in your Google Analytics v4 property, at the bottom of the menu. One […]

This is a tip for how to manage lots of Google Analytics accounts using version 3. Goals are a pain to set up when you manage hundreds of accounts, so here is a quick way to do it using Goal Template URLs in Google. Google Analytics version 4 is on the way, but I have […]

Adobe Analytics makes it super-easy to add segements, with a visual designer that will help you build the logic. As well as traditional and/or logical tests, you can use time based “then” tests to create segments where things happen in a specific order. For example, you might be interested in visitors who arrive from a […]

When you start collecting data at scale, you need to decide when to invest in keeping “all the datas” and when to keep only a sample. When it comes to sampling, you need to ensure that the parts you discard and the parts that you keep are a truly representative sample. That means you need […]

There is a common question that crops up in analytics, which is can you average your averages. The short answer is no, but a longer explanation is probably needed. Whether you have grouped your data by month, or region, or some other facet – each average you see is based on a different number of […]

Recently, I wrote about debugging Adobe Analytics, which uses the most widely-available tools that we all have; browser developer tools. It is possible to debug and test a whole host of analytics and tag manager scenarios using the Console and Network tabs of browsers tools if you are willing to scry the query parameters of […]

Websites change. Often. If your analytics depend too much on the exact implementation details of your website your world will be full of hurt when you change it later on. This is why I prefer to use custom events to decouple Adobe Analytics from the website it is tracking. Here’s an example. You could set […]

Adobe Analytics can sometimes be a bit of an enigma, so people often turn to browser extensions to help them with debugging Adobe Analytics. However, for those of us who spend most of our lives in browser tools; there’s a simple way to get x-ray vision into what Analytics is thinking. Let’s get straight down […]

This is the latest in my flurry of articles on analytics, which have all come from various questions and misconceptions about what analytics are, what they are for, and how they work. Today, I’m going to explain that analytics are lossy, what that means, and why it’s okay. Let’s define what we mean by “lossy”. […]

This is a quick note about checking trends over time, and why you probably ought to check both a rolling comparison over time and a fixed baseline comparison. Quite often you’ll find a dashboard with a comparison over time shown as a percentage, in either green (good) or red (bad) – or orange if you’re […]