Tom Capper's posts about Analytics

SEO Forecasting in Google Sheets

A free forecasting template, all calculated natively within Sheets. In a genuinely unrelated incident, I ended up starting work at Moz two weeks after this was published.

Organic traffic down YoY? It’s not what you think…

Brief exploration of the impact of ITP 2.1 on channel reporting in Google Analytics. Some client sites I looked at were overlooking huge gains in organic search performance over the last few years.

“Impressions” is an Undervalued SEO KPI

This article originally appeared over at https://www.distilled.net/resources/impressions-is-an-undervalued-seo-kpi/. That URL 404s at the time of writing, hence the new location here.

How Do Sessions Work? – Whiteboard Friday

This is my 2nd Whiteboard Friday appearance, but actually the one I recorded first. It’s about a pet peeve of mine, or at least something that seems to come up *constantly* in SEO work – the surprisingly finicky definitions in Google Analytics.

Analytics Black Holes

I’d long noticed on sites with multiple analytics setups, that traffic levels could differ even on unfiltered views. In this post, I tried to dig into the patterns in that data.

Digital Marketing Data Analysis Pitfalls

A bit of a rant about some of my biggest pet peeves in interpreting analytics, rank tracking or ranking factor study data.

Getting Started with Measuring Brand Awareness

This article originally appeared over at https://www.distilled.net/measuring-brand-awareness/. That URL 404s at the time of writing, hence the new location here.

Few people dispute that brand awareness is an important consideration for companies of all sizes – there’s a half-trillion dollar global advertising industry built largely on that premise, after all. In the SEO industry, however, we’re probably not as aware of it as we should be. I recently published a study on Moz showing that branded search volume is better correlated with organic search ranking in Google than Domain Authority, and as Google gets smarter and links become increasingly unrepresentative of how the web works, we can only expect this relationship to deepen.

Everything You Didn’t Know About Google Analytics – Measurefest

Hidden quirks, misleading metrics and tips and tricks for Google Analytics.

A Guide to Sampling in Google Analytics – Moz Post

Don’t let data sampling lead you astray. Learn when sampling happens in GA, how accurate it is, and what you can do about it.

Quick Fix for Referral Spam in Google Analytics

This article originally appeared over at https://www.distilled.net/resources/quick-fix-for-referral-spam-in-google-analytics/. That URL 404s at the time of writing, hence the new location here.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about referral spam and how it’s ruining everyone’s analytics data. While this isn’t cause for panic, it is very annoying, and depending on the size of your site it could be having a very meaningful effect on your data.