What's in a CNAME

With the rise of ad and content blockers (think Ghostery and uBlock Origin), as well as browser tracking protections (see www.cookiestatus.com), marketing technology vendors have their work cut out for them. And when I refer to “their work”, I mean they have to proactively identify and exploit any loopholes they can find to keep on collecting their precious data. In this article, I’ll take a look at one such exploit vector, the Canonical Name (CNAME) DNS record, in particular. Read More…

DIY Google Ads Account Monitor With R, AdWords API, and Slack API

Every now and then I’m fortunate enough to be able to publish guest posts by illustrious people in the analytics and digital marketing industries. This time, I get to work with an old colleague of mine who’s a veritable wizard when it comes to building solutions that make our daily work in the digital industry so much smoother. Erik Grönroos works as an analyst in MarkkinointiAkatemia, a Finnish digital customer acquisition agency. Read More…

Static Site Search With Hugo + App Engine + Search API + Python

As the year changed to 2018, I decided to abandon WordPress, which I had been using for over 12 years as my content management system of choice. I had many reasons to do so, but the biggest motivators were the opportunity to try something new and to abandon the bloat and clutter of WordPress for a more simple, more elegant order of things. Spurred on by another adopter, Mark Edmondson, I decided to give Hugo a go (pun intended). Read More…

Universal Analytics: Weather as a Custom Dimension

There is a new version of this post for GTM V2 here. [Last updated June 2014] I’ve fallen in love with Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Together they form an incredibly powerful tool for marketing professionals. In most cases, I no longer need to post recommendations to my client for yet another page template revision, since with the tag manager in place, I can just add custom code via the admin panel. Read More…