Archive for March, 2009
Google Analytics Filter – Force Lowercase
Filter Name: Force Lowercase
Filter Purpose: To ensure URL’s and pages that can be visited/accessed using both upper case and lower case characters are reported as the same page. For example:
www.analyticscookies.com/Google-Analytics.html
www.analtyticscookies.com/google-analytics.html
are reported as the same page. Without this filter, Google Analtyics will report these pages as unique, when they should be the same.
Filter Difficulty: easy
Instructions: [...]
Google Analytics Filter – Filter and Combine Traffic from eMail Sources
Filter Title: Combine Email Traffic from Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL mail etc.
Purpose: To combine traffic from email’s, specifically email programs like gmail, yahoo, live, msn, aol etc. A quick look at your Google Analytics reports will show something like the screen shot below if you don’t use filters like these. By applying this [...]
Google Analytics Filters – A “Big” Collection
I was going to call this post “Google Anaytics Filters – The Complete Collection” but then I realized, this just isn’t possible. The list will never be complete as every site is different and a proper analytics set-up includes the ability to answer the “business questions.” What are those you ask? (…and I’m glad [...]
What is a Cookie – Part 2
Part 1 of this series discussed some of the differences between how analytics packages work. Some of the most popular web analytics systems (Google Analytics, Omniture to name a couple) use Javascript which takes advantage of cookies. Part 1 covered most of this except for the difference between cookies.
There are 4 types of cookies that fall into [...]
What is a Cookie? – Part 1
So how do web analytics packages work anyway? Well, that question is a little more complex that it might seem. It depends, are you referring to server based web logs, JavaScript tags? web beacons? or perhaps packet sniffers? These four options comprise the main ways web analytics programs work.
More and more, todays most popular [...]
