Noise or Music?

These are my best tools, or “add-ons” I use when working with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. They focus on helping you get you get on top of and maintaining your data quality. I use all of them regularly (listed in no specific order).

From the recent Forrester Prediction 2019 report:

57% of global data and analytics decision makers are still at the early stages of their insights-driven business. Only 8% demonstrate advanced insights-driven competencies.

Meaning, that despite the hype of recent years around machine learning and artificial intelligence, even the biggest companies struggle to extract value from their data at scale and drive impactful business results.

Mulling over this insight, I wanted to add my thoughts for why organisations are in such a low state of analytics maturity. Based on working with senior managers in large brand-leading organisations, these are my top 3 reasons:

Part of my job involves auditing Google Analytics setups in order to establish the quality of the data collected. This video story brings together some of the extraordinary findings of my work. Its a study of 75 enterprise websites using Google Analytics. I describe the audit methodology and display the results in a visual scorecard format.

The results are somewhat surprising (and depressing) in that they show the general poor quality of data that organisations are working with – an average Quality Index score of only 35.7 out of 100. One surprising metric is that 1 in 5 websites had a PII issue i.e. were collecting personal information into Google Analytics reports…

The Google Analytics feature anonymize IP is a A key recommendation for GDPR compliance, also known as “aip”. As the name suggests, this simple switch drops the last 3 digits from your visitor’s IP address. For example, if a visitor has a public ip of 215.113.40.184, then Google will obfuscate this to 217.115.40. (and all other visitor ip addresses) when it processes your Google Analytics data. No ip address data is stored. That’s good for GDPR compliance because ip data is considered PII in Europe.

So if the last 3 digits of an IP address are removed, does that impact geolocation data?

The answer is of course yes, but how much of an impact, and should you worry about it..?

GDPR means that organisations need to keep records of all personal data, be able to prove that consent was given, show where data is going, what its being used for, and how it is being protected.

But what defines personal data…? And how is PII different…?

I must admit that the new Google Analytics documentation about the GDPR specific Data Retention setting is confusing! The assumption from many clients is that ALL data older than NN months is going to be deleted i.e. a cliff-edge effect where any report older than say 26 months is going to be empty. The setting is important, […]

In this post I address a key question that is troubling many a website owner using Google Analytics (the “Controller” in GDPR terminology): Is explicit consent required before I can track my visitors?

I am going to assume you are aware of GDPR (who isn’t? And Facebook have successfully heightened the awareness in the US). You should also be aware that even though I work in the data industry, I have been a strong privacy advocate for many years now. I approach the subject as an end-user would. Let’s face it, for many years now the data/tracking industry has a bad reputation in general…

It is interesting to note that although GDPR has been 10 years in the making, Google Trends shows that since the start of 2018, the volume of searches for the term “GDPR” is now more than double that at any period the previous year i.e. this is important:

My challenge: As with viewing any information containing charts, tables, diagrams etc. reading content in COLOUR is very important to me, more so than the purchase price. Hence, why the book Successful Analytics was in colour – by necessity it uses better quality paper and hopefully by using colour, the points are clearer as well as easier to remember. However colour printing is expensive – it always was. So I need your feedback via this 2 second poll – it will help me to decide what to do with the next version of Successful Analytics.

My extension to the GTM Tips post by Simo Ahava (Tip 64!). Essentially, I extend the regex for more rigorous email checks and add prevent other PII types getting in to Google Analytics. You don’t need to ask why this is so important in today’s GDPR compliance world…

If you haven’t gotten around to reading my latest book: Successful Analytics – or want get one for a colleague/client, here is a great opportunity… I am running a one-time sale of 50% OFF all paperback orders – for 1 month only (hard stop of 13-Aug-2017). There is limited stock, so its a first come […]