AnalyticsEvangelist

I thought I was going mad for a while – in fact I haven’t ruled it out. When pulling segmentation data through the Google Analytics API for April 2011, I was getting 0 every time. After several head-scratching hours I could find nothing wrong with my software, so I ran a report on the web [...]

Only 7% of people get their full 8 hours of sleep per night. No biggie? Getting too little sleep is associated with a 200% rise in cancer, a 100% rise in heart disease, and a 20% rise in the likelihood you’ll be dead in 20 years. This is all according to a simple but effective [...]

As an existing customer of Webmania I have had huge problems over the past 6 months with their billing mistakes, domain registration failures and inability to reply to any second level enquiries. The live chat and helpdesk are still operational (supplied by a third party), but the UK side of the company seems to have [...]

Saw this and loved it. This isn’t a map. Each line represents Facebook friendships between two people, to the nearest city. I was looking for the source and it was actually made by Facebook intern Paul Butler. What an innovative use of data. Here is the full resolution.

In the post 10 things on my Omniture Discover wish list I mentioned that I’d found a way to copy reports between projects or environments without having to completely rebuild them. A couple of people have asked me about this so here it is. Step 1: Cpen the project you want to copy from, and [...]

I consider an infographic to be good if it can draw attention quickly and then encourage the reader to continue searching for the smaller details, telling a story. The content isn’t what I’m showing here, but the effectiveness of presentation. Here are some of my recent favourites. Undersea cables of the world Click image for [...]

Google Instant Search is now live for those logged into their Google account. The key difference between instant and the old search is that the visitor does not need to type their whole search term as Google will make intelligent suggestions based on the first few key strokes. The good news is that this doesn’t [...]

Understanding the information contained within a GA cookie is useful for debugging as well as deciphering what information is being stored about you on each visit to a website. How do you get to see them? The easiest way is to visit the site in Firefox, open FireCookie (F12), navigate to the Cookies tab. You’ll [...]

Recently I sat down and lined up the transactions reported in our back-end systems with those reported in GA. What this showed was that 20-25% of transactions were missing in GA. These were real orders with real payments made against them, and although I expected a gap of a few percent, this is a big [...]

Google’s web interface is easy to use and fairly intuitive, but there are hundreds of tools out there that can improve things. The tools below are my most used add-ons. They increase productivity by lowering the amount of time it takes to obtain data and increase the time you can spend on insight and action. [...]