Analytics

We recently came across an analytics implementation issue that we haven’t seen before — a rather delightful and novel experience for us these days! While this issue’s existence has been documented across the web (as we discovered when searching for it specifically), it was new to us, and we wanted to make this issue known to our blog readers in case it rears its ugly head.

The long and short of it is that a Content Security Policy can break your Google Tag Manager implementation, but with the right fix, the two can coexist peacefully.

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a great way to offload resources such as images, JavaScript and CSS from your server to another server that can deliver them more efficiently. For example, a CDN will host your resources across multiple servers in various locations so that when something is requested it can deliver it speedily from the server closest to the origin request. In addition to caching and compressing your resources, this gives your server much more bandwidth to load fewer resources, and as a result your page load speeds improve.

It’s quite commonplace for a CDN to use their domain in the URL for your resources, since they are the ones hosting them after all. Since custom CDN URLs matching your server are usually an added cost from CDN providers, most people settle for the server CDN URL, which usually looks something like this: 

Since your images are being hosted on a different domain, they won’t show up in Google Search Console when you set up your site because you don’t have ownership of example-cdn.com. A step is required in order to authenticate your ability to access data.

Fortunately there is a way to have the best of both worlds! 

Welcome to the latest installment of my ongoing unofficial series that I’ve just spontaneously decided to name “Google Changes Everything”. Today, we’ll be discussing Google Analytics 4, which as of its October 14 announcement constitutes the biggest change that Google has ever made to the most important piece of marketing software that they (or anyone else) ever created. I hope to give you a sense of the big changes that this new iteration has brought to this extremely popular web analytics platform, and to cover everything that I feel you need to know as you begin to use it.

There are many choices when it comes to web analytics tools, but only one is considered the default: Google Analytics. This might not be a huge issue, but in an ever-increasing privacy-focused world, why don’t the privacy-forward analytics tools get used more often? Why are they not the standard? 

Google Analytics has recently released a closed beta of a new Phone Analytics feature. We were fortunate enough to be able to test this out for an UpBuild client. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.