The other day I was reading some advice from Google about spotting traffic drops and one part caught my eye: Change the date range to include 16 months. This will help you analyze the traffic drop in context and make sure it’s not a drop that happens every year as a result of a holiday …
Tag: analysis
Why you want to save historic data for later
The reason to collect and analyze metrics is to help make a decision. No decision, no point in collecting metrics. Sometimes you’ll want to collect metrics ahead of time though. That way when you’re ready to make a decision, you have enough historical data to support you. That’s why every website installs Google Analytics or …
Designing a data analysis to remove risk
I’m getting ready for Spring in the garden but starting too early risks losing some plants to sudden cold. Last week I found a set of data with Portland’s high and low temperatures from 1938 to today in a simple format. So I loaded that data up, ran a simple analysis, and found how many …
Diagnosing a 30% cost increase with historic data
This week we received our electricity bill and it was about 30% higher than last year. At first I thought our new ductless heaters were to blame. Maybe they weren’t as efficient as I thought. After looking into the data and putting some thought into it, I realized I was jumping to the wrong conclusion. …
Find out which marketing campaigns are your keepers
With the holiday rush and any post-holiday orders over, now’s a good time to dig into your results. Ideally you tracked your traffic and orders which will make things easier (e.g. Google’s UTM codes). Even if you didn’t, you might be able to look at the timing of orders to see which campaigns where active. (And …
Time to unwrap your year end Shopify store data
With the year now over, it’s a good time to evaluate how you did. Take some time this week to pull all of last year’s data and analyze it: what traffic sources and campaigns brought the most customers? what was the most successful campaigns? how many orders did you receive? how many customers ordered? what …
Importing data into Google Analytics for a better analysis
Recently a customers asked about getting historic data into Google Analytics: I’d love to know how to get Shopify data (prior to embedding Google tracking code) on to Google Analytics to see previous years data. At first I didn’t think that was possible but after a bit of searching I found Google’s Data Import that …
That dread that comes from not knowing your important numbers
For a few months I’ve had a worry about a key metric of my business. My gut was telling me it was a major problem but there was no way to know for sure with my current analytics. So finally yesterday I wrote some code to extract the data and analyze it. When I finished, …