A developer's guide to web analytics – new post every 1st & 3rd Tuesday
Articles that explain general concepts and principles behind web analytics and Adobe Analytics
I was reading Jim Gordon's excellent article on Adobe DTM vs. Launch a while back. If you haven't read it, do. It is excellent. While reading it, I started to think about one aspect, and how I think there is an awesome opportunity for a nitpick in it: Jim (and most people I know) say …
Continue reading Nitpick: Launch does not support Page Load Rules
Yes, I know, Launch. But I had this post in the pipeline for some time now, and here you go. As a bonus, I have noted where Launch, by Adobe, handles things differently. If you came here from my "battle post", then this is some background that'll help you understand why I wrote the other …
Continue reading The Mechanics of Loading Analytics Code with DTM
In April 2013, I wrote about "Dynamic Variables", a mechanism that helps remove duplication in the tracking URLs, making the tracking requests potentially shorter. Even at the time, the original reason for doing so was no longer a show stopper: Internet Explorer up to version 9 had the annoying habit of not requesting any URLs …
No beating about the bush this time, I'll just spit out what I have to say: There is no reason to embed DTM staging libraries anywhere, like, ever! I don't actually think this is controversial, more of an example of what I heard a colleague say the other day: "common sense" and "common practice" are …
Someone asked me the other day: if I cannot currently run tests to improve data quality, is there anything else I can do to make my data better? Now there's a good question! The obvious, easy, and somewhat lame answer is: well, why can't you run tests? You'd be able to catch and prevent, like, …
There is a new kid on the block of web security: Content Security Policy, or CSP. It is not actually that new, but people start using it in earnest, and I have over the past months have had a couple of questions about how CSP influences Analytics and other parts of the Experience Cloud. So …
![[screenshot]](https://webanalyticsfordevelopers.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/170801-maint-aa-update-avail.png?w=900)
The cool thing about Analytics, from the point of view of a developer: once you have set it up, it is completely maintenance-free! Fire and forget! Or is it? The truth is that a) "once you have set it up" is not the way I would describe Analytics (or other things like targeting, personalisation, testing, …
(I mentioned two weeks ago that I sometimes blog because I want to learn and/or remember things. This is one of those articles.) Whether you are a regular reader or just generally interested, I'm sure you know that most (if not all) analytics tools these days work by sending "tracking calls", "hits", "beacons", or whatever …
There are tools out there that find bogus links on your site, and some even try to find links outside your site that point to nirvana. But your friendly marketer likely wants to have better data than that, so she asks you to build tracking for 404 pages. Now what? Let me explain, both for …
I am no lawyer, and I do not want to go into any legal or even ethical or moral aspects of EU privacy law. Let's just say this for our American friends: people in the EU do not like to know they're being marketed to. Mostly. They also fear Google more than their own government, …
