An interesting debate evolved today centered around tagging best practice, mainly in consideration about the rights or wrongs of tagging at the top or bottom of the page.
The top of the page has the obvious issue that you are beholden to the availability of your analytics provider, so unless you are brave then one to be avoided but in theory gets you the largest set of visitors tracked, even those that click away before the page loads which is arguably not valid, but is it when you consider you may have spent your PPC budget on acquiring them.
The bottom of the page carries less dependency risk if your analytics provider goes down, and is typically where most people would tag their pages.
The positioning of tagging on a page can make 20-30% difference on visitors you track. Also relevant is the fact that if the site is very slow, or uses a lot of display advertising then the visitor may have consumed, or scanned the content to make an action/decision before being tracked. Whether you count these visitors or not becomes quite relevant, especially as this could affect landing page metrics, individual page bounce rate and overall bounce rate.
The evidence is fairly anecdotal, but the moral to this one is be careful where you tag and really think about what purpose your site serves to consider the location of your tagging. Also consider each type of page, checkout confirmations are a great example of top tagging versus the rest of the site where you may deploy bottom tagging.
By top tagging, I mean anywhere after the <body> tag and bottom tagging, immediately prior to the </body>
Google recently introduced a qualification for Google Analytics with its Google Analytics Individual Qualification (IQ). There are a series of informative video’s that are definitely recommended to be watched before taking the test, which costs $50. I have just finished and passed the test.
The test is 90 minutes long and consists of 70 questions, the pass criteria is 75%
Andrew Read - Google Analytics Individual Qualification
I’ve been looking for a new mountain bike for some time, frequently visiting our local specialist bike store Peter Handsford in Chandlers Ford. Sadly I just couldn’t afford the price tag on a bike that is suitable to replace my now 10 year old GT XCR 2000, with its great i-drive mechanism. Last week I happened to luck into a visit courtesy of my sons rather broken (and still under warranty) Giant Mountain Bike. They had an ex-demo Gary Fisher Roscoe 3 at just a little over half the RRP of £3k.
The spec of the bike is incredible, lots of carbon fiber making it very light. Hydraulic disk brakes and fully adjustable travel shocks. The handling of the G2 geometry along with full adjustable fox rear and front shocks makes it a great all-rounder. I test drove it down the Clarendon Way, my old GT XCR200, now 10 years old has taken quite a battering on the narrow downhill. It’s not too technical, but take it at speed early in the morning when its wet under tyre and its a heck of a lot of fun and quite challenging.
All in all, superbly impressed with my new Gary Fisher. Hope to get out on it soon for more fun.
Having now successfully fallen off my bike a couple of time, injuring my back and heel I felt it was time to slow down. I’m still practicing the 180 and getting higher in the bowl and also dropping straight in from quarter pipes rather than lowering myself in. Riding off a pipe is a major block I’ve had, made all the easier by a teenager who insisted it was easy to do. He was right, having made me feel so foolish for not just trying it. He was also showing me how to jump up from the quarter pipe onto the down ramp. Having told him I was 38, not 15 and about twice his weight he did see my point that it wasn’t something I was going to do today
Trying to get higher up in the bowl and turning, easy does it….
A rolling drop in sequence. Awesome, such a rush when you drop in!
The question is will I drop in to the bowl next week or bottle it?
Kieran and I headed out early on Saturday to the BMX park. This was a chance to check that I could still get out of the bowl and get up ramps OK. Note to self, no coffee next time I do this! Having got through the initial caffeine shakes I settled into doing some ramps. After plucking up enough courage to fall off my bike and break my face I dropped in off a ramp, this is about a foot lower than the bowl so a good start.
Kieran took great delight in telling me how his bike was better as his front sprocket was much smaller so it didn’t bank the lip as we dropped in off the ramp.
The major achievement was getting up the ramp the other end of the drop in. Given I’m not a teenager and weigh ever so slightly more, getting speed is a major issue.
This was so much fun! We spent two and a half hours messing around on the bikes, I spent the rest of the weekend recovering from it!
Day 3 was pretty good, no falling off! After some trepidation I had a go at getting out of the bowl (I still can’t get in to it without using the drop in). This felt really good, it’s just about speed. The first two attempts were interesting, how to slide back in to the bowl without losing the skin off your knees! Anyway, out I got….
Having mastered this we also tried the ramps, same concept, just less run off when you do get to the top of the ramp. Once mastered I couldn’t stop it. Thank goodness for the railings on the odd occasion of over cooking it trying to get a bit of lift.
Awesome! I can’t wait until the next time we get out, but that could be a week or so now.
Day 2, which was some point last week, possibly Thursday or Friday. We braved the Volcano for the first time. After falling off on the first attempt, going too fast the second and third, taking the paint off my shiny new bottom bracket on the fourth, I managed to get over it, albeit without any “air”, which I’m told is the next step.
I now have under 2 years until the dreaded 40 have decided that I’d embark on a few challenges. One of which, laid down by my teenage son was to get on a BMX. So, off I popped to the shops and came back with something resembling a toy bike, I don’t remember bikes being so small, Kieran’s blog gives the spec, but it’s apparently a We The People BMX, called “Crysis”, quite apt I feel. So, this is my ever so quick journal on my advances. Bear in mind I have never been to a skate (BMX) park in my life, and it was about 23 years ago I last got on a BMX to do a bunny hop.
Now this is smart, for all those stats junkies that just can’t keep away from their website analytics, you can now get latest visitor trends using a cool iphone app from analyticsapp.com.
All these metrics really do eat into time sitting on the beach reading a decent book though…. as if I get chance!
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