Google Analytics v4 is all grown up, and finally a freemium product

What if Google Analytics v4 (App+Web) was the best thing to happen to Google Analytics in the last 15 years? Will it finally give all the insights? Can I get free access to GA360? Will it cure cancer? Will it revive Steve Jobs?

All I know is that my data is going to be a lot tastier and scalable very soon – provided I add my credit card.

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Measuring the impact of adblocking with Google Analytics and GTM

adblock extension for Google Chrome and FirefoxLately, there has been a lot of talk about adblocking and its impact on digital marketing campaigns. Most digital pundits will blame adblocking for everything that is wrong with online ad campaigns – very often with no idea of what they’re talking about. In this post, I describe a method to measure said impact without having to rely on preconceived ideas or resort to guesstimates. Of course, this is done with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, which, ironically, are also the target of adblocking plugins – but we’ll get into that later.

Interested? See you after the jump!

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Google Analytics adds support for TeleRemarketing in Universal Analytics

Ever since Google released Google Universal Analytics, they have been getting flak for their lack of DoubleClick support for Universal Analytics, whereas “classic” Google Analytics got all the features: tighter integration with DoubleClick, remarketing, demographic information, etc.

The answer Google (and certified partners such as Hub’Sales) gave early adopters has always been “SOON”. Clearly that was not enough to sate the data appetites of our beloved analytics nerds.

I personally don’t see Google releasing DoubleClick integration any time soon. I was hoping they would release it at the same time as the San Francisco eMetrics summit in March, like they usually do. Then I figure they’d wait until September, when the Google Analytics Certified Partners conference usually happens – they make big announcements then.

So I figured i’d bid my time just like everyone else but I received this from the Google Universal Analytics product team a moment ago: before getting Remarketing, Google Universal Analytics is going to get native integration with Google Voice to provide TeleRemarketing support in Google Analytics.

If you use Google Voice to place telemarketing calls, its API will automatically export call data into Google Analytics, which you can then use as a remarketing list for classic GA. You can also export the list of phone numbers and resell them to telemarketing firms, using the standard export format. Qualified telemarketing lists will sell for more (or less) depending on how well qualified the leads are.

Don’t believe me? Maybe you shouldn’t. At any rate, tomorrow (April 2nd) stay tuned to the Google Analytics official blog for an announcement I’m sure you’ll appreciate 😉

Google Tag Manager Data Layer for WordPress

[UPDATE] Google Tag Manager Data Layer for WordPress is now available on GitHub

[UPDATE] You guys are too lazy and prefer Duracell Tomi’s plugin 🙂

This year again, I was invited to talk at Superweek, the premier Analytics/PPC conference in Eastern Europe.
I talked about tag management best practices and mentioned my Google Tag Manager data layer for WordPress implementation. In this post, I am sharing my setup with you.

Ready? Let’s modify your theme!

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Tag management is not a miracle cure

Had lots of fun this year at Superweek giving presentations, sitting on a panel and dispensing a training.

The presentation slides on “Tag Management is not a miracle cure” are available on SlideShare or embedded below.
If you would like to receive a PDF copy of the slides or to book me as an analytics speaker for a conference, please use my contact form and I will make sure to assist you.

Unique visitor tracking in Google Analytics

Until Google’s Universal Analytics is rolled out we have little to no capability in Google Analytics for tracking unique visitors. Here is a little trick to capture “visitors” to your website.

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Get Google Analytics performance heatmaps in… Excel!

Hey kids,

this post is just a quick tip to better visualize your Google Analytics data in terms of performance.

Sure, there are lots of ways to visually compare and analyze data directly in Google Analytics – or any other digital analytics solution for that matter. But bear with me and I’ll show you a neat trick… in Excel 😉

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“Recover” (not provided) keywords in Google Analytics

As a follow-up to my post on (not provided) , in this post I give you *one* of the methods I use for capturing “(not provided)” keywords in Google Analytics. Just to be clear this solution is far from perfect and you will remain frustrated. As I said in my previous post, short of a Google Webmaster Tools API, there is no (not provided) silver bullet.

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(not provided) is here to stay – deal with it

Google logo

If you work in digital analytics or SEO, by now you’ve heard about the web tracking phenomenon that is (not provided).

Since the end of 2011, Google has implemented measures to respect the privacy of Internet users on the words and expressions they use on its search engine. Specifically, Google is gradually switching searches to secure mode (SSL / HTTPS) and no longer passes referrer information to the search result website, which means that keyword information is lost.

As of now you can still know the source and medium (Google organic search), but the keyword is replaced with a useless “(not provided)” label.

The impact for marketing and SEO agencies seems enormous. Entire business models based on Google search could collapse.

Or could they?

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