Blog Archives

Insights that matter

Posted on 01/09/2016 by Dominic Hurst — 1 Comment

Back in 2014, the excellent Ben Holliday wrote about metrics that matter and user research. Two key points stood out for me; firstly how as an analyst you have to change your thinking to work in an agile manner; secondly…

Know your user – 5 advanced segments to use when defining “real users” – Google Analytics

Posted on 21/07/2015 by Dominic Hurst — Leave a comment

Following on from my post on aggregated metrics (pageviews, sessions, users) I thought it would be good to share some segment ideas that can define your users into “real users”. Using this metric (rather than the aggregated version) or as…

Tagged with: advanced, best practice, Google Analytics, insights, Segment, segmentation
Posted in Insights, Understanding Google Analytics

Humanise your data: 5 things you can do to get Google Analytics reporting on real “user” insights

Posted on 22/06/2015 by Dominic Hurst — Leave a comment

Often when we talk quantitative data, we talk metrics and dimensions: sums, averages, aggregates, time, day etc. Data is often soulless and very rarely contains context especially a human context. On the flip side, qualitative data or persona information is…

Lies, damned lies, and aggregated statistics. Google Analytics Overview reports explained including why you shouldn’t use them

Posted on 27/05/2015 by Dominic Hurst — 3 Comments

Strong title I know, but its got your attention. For clarity, Google Analytics doesn’t lie, what does is those people using the data who are either misinformed or aren’t getting the most out of GA…read on if that’s you! This post…

Using Personas in Google Analytics to drive “real” insights

Posted on 24/04/2015 by Dominic Hurst — 2 Comments

Google Analytics goal reports split by persona

No doubt a lot of you use or have heard about personas. Creating personas comes from analysing and understanding user behaviour from a range of sources including quant data. At NICE we have begun the journey of creating personas and naturally I started…

Create meaningful insights for Enterprise Search Tools using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager

Posted on 21/04/2015 by Dominic Hurst — Leave a comment

We, NICE, like several other organisations provide a search facility similar to an enterprise search; that being we index several external resources and provide the tool to search them. By default this means the standard site search feature of Google Analytics…

Tagged with: enterprise, enterprise search, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, insights, search, search query
Posted in General Advice, Improvements, Insights

Search Destination Page – New Google Analytics metric that gives insights about your internal search engine

Posted on 20/11/2014 by Dominic Hurst — 2 Comments

A new metric has appeared in Google Analytics this week, that being “Search Destination Page” Previously we have “start page” and “destination page”, the latter being the page the results show on, which for most is the search results page. Now…

Creating a culture for measurement – data, insights, optimisation, improvements and solutions

Posted on 22/07/2014 by Dominic Hurst — 2 Comments

Please note a new post from MeasureCamp 2015 which discussed Buy-in to a culture of data-driven design One of the hardest challenges I have faced in my various web related roles is buy-in to the power of the web. It…

Tagged with: culture, impact, improvement, insights, measure, measurement, optimisation, success
Posted in General Advice, Measurement Model