Panagiotis Tzamtzis - Digital analytics consultant & Web developer

Exclude personal data from your web analytics

Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data or personal data (e.g. email addresses, social security numbers etc.) is a complete nightmare for web analysts. Every web analytics platform is very clear on this matter, that their systems are not designed to store PII data. Google analytics also states in the service’s terms, that any GA account found storing PII data will be deleted by their administrator. If you end up having your account deleted, the chances of bringing it back online are very slim. Adobe Analytics will also advice its users against storing personal data on their servers. Most marketers don’t need...

Web tracking project planning – Digital analytics meetup, Thessaloniki

This week I was presenting on our local digital analytics meetup, in Thessaloniki. My talk was focused on how someone can start web tracking on a corporate or even a smaller website using web analytics platforms. It’s an introductory talk which focuses mainly on the processes someone must follow to ensure high quality results and satisfy both business/marketing teams and the development team, which will be part of the project. I have followed the process described in the slide more than once, when implementing analytics and marketing tools on large multilingual corporate websites and I can guarantee that it’s totally...

Why in-store analytics is important

I believe that this quote summarizes perfectly why it is important to make store redesign decisions more data-driven, to improve user experience. If you are interested in learning more on how in-store analytics works you can check my complete talk, which is a great introduction to this topic. Sign up to receive updates about new posts!

How will GDPR affect your web analytics

After going through several white papers, discussions and online articles I will try to cover the most important changes for online analytics which will come with EU’s new data protection rule (GDPR). This is an upgrade to EU’s ePrivacy data law (aka ICO cookie law) that will come into effect on May 25th 2018. Most of digital analytics vendors have already started presenting solutions that you could use to be compliant with this new regulation, but it’s sure that as we get closer to spring 2018  a lot of things will change on how websites operate. What is GDPR? GDPR...

HTTP status codes

If you are working with analytics you have to know what each HTTP status code means. Every piece of information travelling through the webs is also carrying a status code with it every time it travels. HTTP status codes are standard response codes given by web site servers on the Internet. The codes help identify the cause of the problem when a web page or other resource does not load properly. Every status code consists of 3 digits and belongs to one of 5 main groups. The first digit of the status code indicates the general type of response (the main group of the status...

In-store analytics – Talk at Digital Analytics Meetup, Thessaloniki

Retail is going through some hard times over the past couple of years. This means that there’s need for change. Data-driven decisions have helped online stores in the past and have evolved eCommerce into an extremely profitable channel for sales. Can a similar approach help also offline stores? We examine the current market status, and options available for data measurement and analysis, when monitoring an offline store or shopping center. You’ll notice that there are a lot of similarities between web analytics and in-store analytics and we can use our experience from the web to improve the customer’s experience in...

Shedding light on dark social traffic

Dark social traffic is still an issue that impacts traffic data collection on a daily basis for all web analytics tools (even Google analytics). If you see a high percentage of direct traffic (especially for pages with long URLs, which are difficult to type), you should spend some time to go through this article.