The User-Centric Approach – Google Universal Analytics vs. Mixpanel

About 6 months ago, Google released Universal Analytics, which – in a nutshell – offers 4 new key features: Measurement Protocol – an API that can be used for multi-platform tracking Improved Feature Configuration Management – through the GA admin screens, rather than the JavaScript agent Custom Dimensions and Metrics – very similar to the[…]

Linking events to a specific user in Google Universal Analytics

In this post I will show you how to send events for a specific user from both the JavaScript agent (Analytics.js) and the Measurement Protocol. I could not find any existing information about how to do so. After some research, I did, however, find a great presentation by @techpad that talks about improving e-commerce tracking[…]

My Google Tag Manager Wishlist

The Google Tag Manager (GTM) is indeed a great tool to have. Although several tag management services did exist before (such as tagman and ubertags), none of them were as simple and as easy as GTM – at least not for me. I know the GTM has only been with us for few months, and[…]

Changes in the Web Analytic Market Landscape, Part II

In my previous post, I described the changes that the Web Analytics Industry has seen over the past 6 years (more or less). From there being very few vendors, we have now reached a point where for each segment there are literally dozens of companies offering their services. In addition, huge changes have occurred in[…]

Goal Analysis (Part II) – Measuring Distances to Goal Completion

In the post about the differences between first, total and unique goal completions, I talked about the possible differences between site goals and business goals, and how different metrics might be required to measure the latter. In a nutshell, there are goals where the total number of completions is important, such as a total number[…]

_setCampValues for Google Analytics

A few months ago I published a post about setting GA campaign tracking using JavaScript, offering a detailed explanation of the problem (the fact Google Analytics does not provide a way for setting campaign tracking information using JavaScript), together with a solution for overcoming this problem (implementing extra JavaScript coding).   Many people have since[…]