Actual Metrics's blog

Why do you see yourself as the source of traffic?

If you see your own website under the Referring Sites report in Google Analytics, it may be a symptom of bad or missing code on your site. If the number of self-referrals are too high, they could be corrupting your data and covering up the real traffic sources.

Find out what the cause of the self-referrals are and what you should do about them.

Go from a Google Analytics hobbyist to an analyst in ten minutes with these tools.

The Google Analytics interface provides access to a number of tools that users often overlook. The interface is unobtrusive enough that sometimes users aren't even aware that they exist. These tools allow you to display reports differently. Using these tools will help you find trends and correlations in your data that aren't always visible at a quick glance. Mastering them makes a big difference between meaningfully analyzing your reports and just looking at numbers.

Today we announce the roll out of two free Google Analytics tools: a tracking code generator and LinkTagger. These allow for easy customization of your Google Analytics tracking code and for automatic tagging of all your outbound links and downloads.

Google Analytics becomes much more useful when it knows what is important to you.

Goals in Google Analytics allow you to define important events and then start tracking conversions. You can tie those events back to traffic sources that visitors used before converting. You can use them to begin measuring relative influence of each page on your site. Goals can also tell you on which pages in a process you are losing visitors.

In short, goals are an important piece of the puzzle if you want to know how your site and your marketing are performing.

As Google Analytics has become more ubiquitous, disruptions in service tend to be felt far and wide.

Google Analytics Outages

There have been a handful of widespread outages since Google Analytics was first rolled out. They have typically been rare and brief, but they have been troubling for users nonetheless.