Panagiotis Tzamtzis - Digital analytics consultant & Web developer

How will GDPR affect your web analytics

02 Aug 2017 Web analytics 3666

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...

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HTTP status codes

27 Jul 2017 Coding Digital analytics Tag management 3087

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...

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

22 Jun 2017 Digital analytics 1615

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...

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Shedding light on dark social traffic

22 May 2017 Web analytics 1968

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.

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GTM: Flexibility and strength for your website – Talk at TechSaloniki 2017 (Greek)

16 May 2017 Tag management Web analytics 1976

Last weekend I held a talk at TechSaloniki 2017 about GTM. My goal was to introduce GTM to professionals with no previous experience with a Tag Management Systems (TMS) and show them the reasons why someone working  with web analytics should be using it. I also demonstrated several advanced use cases where a Tag Management System like Google Tag Manager can come handy: Removing PII data from your collected traffic data Combining different data sources online Tracking adblocker usage Injecting SEO improvements Enriching data during data collection Formatting and converting data I wanted to make sure that everyone understood the power a...

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A Web Full of Data – Talk at TEDx UniversityOfIoannina 2017 (Tzamtzis, Gkesoulis)

14 May 2017 Web analytics 2303

Last week on Saturday (May 6th) I had the chance to talk, with my colleague Dimitris Gkesoulis, about what we love the most (digital analytics) at TEDx UniversityOfIoannina 2017. It was a great chance for us to present to a crowd, that is not relevant with analytics, how we imagine the future of digital analytics, how we think they can improve our every day life and also educate them on the web tracking technologies and the risks. The complete talk and the rest of the talks of the conference are also available online: You can download our full presentation here...

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Excel function for MD5 hashing without VBA

04 May 2017 Coding Excel Web analytics 53298

When capturing PII data (Personally identifiable information) in GA or Adobe analytics, you need to make sure that the values captured are encrypted/hashed to respect the rules of these platforms. Otherwise you might have your account deactivated without any prior notice! A very common hashing algorithm is MD5. It produces a 128-bit hash value and it’s a one-way hashing algorithm, meaning that you cannot convert the hashed value back to the original one. (Keep in mind that MD5 hashes are only secure when using a unique input value, to prevent reverse lookup attacks e.g. using https://md5.gromweb.com/ ) To be able...

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Common analytics bugs in network sniffers

02 May 2017 Web analytics 3373

When triggering tracking pixels on the click of buttons taking you to a new page you may encounter several issues. This happens because the browser will not give the tracking pixel enough time to contact the remote server. Is this affecting your actual data collection process? Here are a few examples of how a normal tracking pixel request should look like, to make sure everything is working correctly: If you are not seeing something like the ones above, below is a list with the most common issues and the ones you need to pay attention to, as they probably indicate...

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https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/best-web-metrics-digital-companies/

Best digital metrics for 15 different types of companies by Avinash

02 May 2017 Web analytics 1285

An amazing article from the great Avinash Kaushik describing which digital metrics you can use depending on the size and the nature of your business. When you start working with digital analytics it’s very difficult to understand what’s the best way to move forward and what matters most for your business. This article is a great introduction. After spending some time with these suggestions you can customize the reports according to your needs. Bonus: Avinash has also created this great set of custom segments, reports and dashboards that you can import in your Google analytics account. Sign up to receive updates about...

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Tag management systems will *not make your site faster

29 Mar 2017 Tag management 2425

*unless you educate your marketing team and help them understand the impact of website trackers on the page load speed. Are you are working with analytics and online marketing for at least a couple of years? Then you’ve probably felt like you are lying to all your customers every time you say that a Tag Management System will make their website faster. A TMS will help reduce the perceived** page load time of the website, by allowing you to asynchronously load all your tracking pixels and prevent them from blocking the actual content of the page. It will also make...

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