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 […]
We all know that BizOps is gaining momemntum and that we need to think about how we take care of it in our own organisations. Not just because it’s yet another buzzword ending in “Ops”, but because of what we’ve been piecing together for many years. If you’ve read Start With Why, or The Lean […]
Analytics are super-useful but can get a bit tricky at times. For some reason, several of those times seem to have cropped up this week. So, following on from my article on Why Unique Visitors in Analytics Never Adds Up – I now have one about how you can sometimes have more sessions that users. […]
Whether you use Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or some other package to learn about your web traffic, you are likely to come across some odd looking numbers when you start cutting up your Unique Visitors. For example, when you look at your monthly reports and compare them to your annual report you’ll find that you […]