Unfortunately, iFrames still exist. They are used to embed content from one page into another. Frames are horrible, nasty things, very often riddled with cross-domain problems, performance issues, responsive design obstructions and other crap from the nether pits of hell. …
Last weekend, I wrote a very simple web app that automatically creates a number of referral spam filters to tackle the problem that seems to have everybody all riled up. For a nice recap of the situation, take a look at this post by Jeff Sauer, or this article by Mike Sullivan. …
There are many tools and methods to make Google Analytics more manageable. Google Tag Manager is probably the best known of these, and you can find many, many articles about GTM on these pages as well. However, today I want to tell you about one of the features of Universal …
In 2013, I wrote a guide for Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager on how to poll for weather conditions, and send this information to Google Analytics as a custom dimension of the session. The guide was intended as a technical introduction to Google Tag Manager, and I think …
This nifty little solution will let you calculate the time spent on pages that are not tracked in Google Analytics by default. These include both bounced landing pages and exit pages. Bounced pages and exit pages lack the necessary subsequent pageview, which Google Analytics uses …
One of the big mysteries in browser-based data collection platforms like Google Analytics is what happens when the visitor is not being tracked. This is most obvious in cases where the user explicitly opts out of tracking, when the user does not have JavaScript active in their …
The Page Visibility API for web browsers is pretty sweet. It lets you poll, using some new properties of the document object, whether or not the current page is visible to the user. Visibility is hidden if the page is not open in the current browser tab instance, or if the …
