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Anyone who works with Google Analytics should be using BigQuery for their analysis and reporting. There, I said it. Hit level, raw event data is your best source for whatever you want to report, if you want any accuracy at all. Want to exclude employee traffic? Easy. Found some bots? They’re gone.  But this isn’t […]

Today is a very auspicious day.   In less than 24 hours, Google Analytics will stop processing data from tens of millions of websites.  Sites that have been using Google Analytics for a very long time. Getting data out of Google Analytics is hard.  It’s tenuous.  It’s frustrating.  And there are a number of services […]

[EDIT: This post has been edited to share new findings. All edits are clearly noted].   Yesterday I was asked an interesting question by one of my clients.  The organization, which provides services in the United States, wanted to know if a greater percentage of people were booking appointments in a state different from where […]

Using SQL-modeling to tell different stories about user behavior A bit over 7 months ago, Jules (our Head of Data Analysis and Conversion Optimization) sent me a message in Slack letting me know that he just published a blog post: “Session modeling in BigQuery SQL“.  It’s a really fine post, and I recommend that you […]

At Analytics Ninja, we find ourselves ever more and more excited about using Google Tag Manager Server Side containers (SSGTM).   While Google is certainly not the first vendor to introduce Server Side tag management technology, SSGTM it is quickly gaining wide adoption because, well, you know…. Google. I digress… It is important to note that […]

  Finding the diamonds in the rough… One of my favorite features in the Google Analytics UI is the ability to do weighted sorting. With more and more Google Analytics reporting being done in Data Studio, being able to do weighted sorting is something I have felt is sorely missing.  (Spoiler Alert: it still is […]