I pair with Philip Walton (who works for Google on Google Analytics) in this screencast. It complements the case-study we put together: Learning to Use Google Analytics More Effectively at CodePen.
I learned a ton about how Google Analytics works during all this. In a sense, it’s dumber than you think. You can track whatever you want, you just need to send the right data. In another sense, it’s super smart. By giving it just a smidge more information, you can extract a ton more out of it.
If you go in with specific questions, and take the time to implement the (pretty simple) bits necessary to track what you want, you can get the insight you need.
Plus it’s free, for most of us, which is pretty huge.
Thank You, Chris and Philip,
I learned a lot from this video.
I noticed that in a browser that uses Ghostery, the elements that you are tracking with GA do not render. When I disable Ghostery and reload CodePen the elements rendered. I noticed the profile button/Gravatar was effected. I did not check the other GA tracked elements on your CodePen.
The beauty of Ghostery (I use it) is that YOU PICK what you want to block and not block. It doesn’t auto-block GA, you block GA.
But… GA should have zero impact on whether or not an element renders or not. Something else is going there if that’s the behavior you are seeing.
Pretty damn complicated and not intuitive. I appreciate you did the screencast but jeee, not very user friendly, like a t a l l.
Awesome, thanks!
Thank you for the awesome lesson!
I learned a lot from this but the moving of the people is distracting and still sometimes, I found having the talking faces in the way. Can you consider not showing yourselves unless it’s purely talking and not talking while demonstrating? Your face is pretty and all but your content is more valuable without things shifting around constantly.