Google Analytics Filters - How to exclude CIDR IP Ranges with Regular Expressions?

In the last post, we have seen how to automatically add a list of rules and channel groups to multiple Google Analytics views. In the current post, let's look at the Filters in Google Analytics and we will take one specific case of excluding all the traffic given an IP Range (CIDR format) using Regular Expressions.

What are Filters?

This is pretty straightforward. Filters in Google Analytics provide you the way to include or exclude certain traffic which satisfies a set of predefined rules. Let's say you work for a big organization and all of its workforce access the company's website quite often and do a lot of activity. In this case, your data won't look as cool. Your analytics show a very low bounce rate and high page views which are not really true from a business standpoint. So, what you need to do is exclude this traffic from your organization machines. Another scenario where you want to analyze a specific section of people coming from a city alone. In both the scenarios, what you need to do is to create filters and create standalone views where these filters are applied.

Google Tag Manager Tutorial #1: The Interface and creating our first tag!

It's been a long time since I have written something here. I wanted to revive this blog for a long time and today is the day! If you are new here, don't mind! Let's dive into the topic. I have written an article on the basics of Tag Management System quite a long time ago. If you are new to Tag Management and are in the Digital Analytics industry, do read the above article before proceeding to get a basic understanding. This will be a series of articles which is completely dedicated towards Google Tag Manager (GTM), a free tag management tool provided by Google. You do not need any prerequisites of programming but should be able to understand the basics of Digital analytics tracking. We will cover various aspects of complex tracking and programming as we go through the tutorials.

High-level working of GTM

In this first tutorial, let us understand how GTM works on a high level and get an overview of the interface and publish our first Google Analytics Tag.

Understanding Digital Analytics / Web Analytics Process Cycle or Framework

Many times people ask me what is the framework you are using when I work on a project for Digital Analytics tool implementation. I often get frustrated by this question. Why do people give so much importance to the framework or process flow? This time I did not want to get frustrated and thought for a while why do people need a framework? Turned out it's very simple. People don't want to re invent the wheel. They just want to follow a procedure which has been working out well for large number of people for a long time. It sounded absolutely correct to me. I realized my mistake and started reviewing the work I have done and splitted a general Digital Analytics project into different buckets or stages which I think are very much essential. Of course this might be a standard framework you can google and get it.

How to Implement SiteCatalyst on Server side using PHP?

This is an adhoc post I am writing on SiteCatalyst implementation, I will write a detailed series on SiteCatalyst implementation soon. Most of the Web Analytics implementation that's been done on the web is using JavaScript but there might be situations where you will not have that luxury to implement an Analytics tool using JavaScript instead you need to use a Server side approach to do that.

Web Analytics Tutorial #1 - What is Web Analytics?

I have been writing about Tag Management and Web Analytics on an Adhoc basis from some time here. For someone who is new to Web Analytics, the random posts I write may not make much of a sense. So I thought it would be nice if I start a series of posts explaining every detail I know about Web Analytics from scratch in a more organized way. Since most of my work has been on the technical side so far, my posts will have more of a technical tone rather than a qualitative tone unlike Avinash Kaushik's posts.

I will try to give as many as real world examples to explain the concepts. So let's begin by understanding what exactly is web analytics and why do we need such a technology in the first place?

Background
Jack is a movie buff who always decodes and analyzes each bit of the movie and explains to his friends. One of his friends suggested him why don't he start a blog where he can put his thoughts. Impressed by this idea, Jack created a free blog from one of the top blogging platform and started writing interesting articles. He started receiving nice comments as well.

Why Hour of Visit is an important metric? How to track it using Google Tag Manger in Google Universal Analytics?

Last week I have written an introductory post on Google Tag Manager explaining how to implement Google Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager. You might have observed how easy it is to implement the Google UA base code with GTM. It's just a simple plug and play operation. But that's not our whole aim, isn't it? We need to understand what kind of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are we looking for considering the website on which we need to implement the tool and there by come up with perfect Metrics which can be translated into our needed KPIs. This is the whole purpose having a Web Analytics tool at place, to understand the most needed KPIs and how they are being affected by different things.

So, let us consider one such KPI in our present post and simultaneously let's see how to implement them using Google Tag Manager and what all configuration needed to be done on Google UA.

Most of the web is filled up with Content based websites. For example, my blog comes under such category. I just write some posts related to Web Analytics. So, what am I interested in? What patterns am I looking for? How much can I change my marketing pattern or writing pattern?

A report on Tag Management System in Top 100 Internet Retailers

In the previous post, I have talked about the basics of Tag Management System, so most of you would be interested to know about how the Market is receiving TMS solution and how effectively are they using the solution. Fortunately, Lima Consulting Group and well know Tag audit firm (I will talk about Tag Audit Tools in future) Observe Point did a research on Top 100 Retail companies on Internet and about the Web Analytics solutions they are following and came up with a very good report which gives you a snapshot of the Industry's awareness on the TMS tools.

I would like to present you the highlights of the report. These highlights will answer most of the questions you will be having on the present industry's maturity levels in web analytics.

Understanding the Basics of Tag Management System

If you meet someone from the Web Analytics industry or if you are keeping yourself updated about the industry, you will be hearing a lot about Tag Management System (TMS for short) these days. So what exactly TMS mean? Let us take a dive into this subject matter and understand the different questions.

What is Web Analytics?
If you are a beginner and new to Web Analytics, Web Analytics is nothing but a method of studying the online traffic, visitor behavior and coming up with an actionable insight which will be useful in decision making. So, to study the online traffic we use different tools which collect the data from websites and showcase in a nice Interface with various features. Some of the examples for such tools are Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, IBM CoreMetrics, WebTrends, Piwik and others. Most of these tools use JavaScript tags placed on the website to collect data. We have other kind of tools which perform log analysis. To know more about the history of Web Analytics, I would suggest you to read the Wiki of Web Analytics.

Let's continue with our understanding of Tag Management System.

How I got a job because of Social Media?

Hello everyone, I am Ram Manohar Bokkisa, presently working as a Web Analyst in a MNC. I have been working there since August 2011. Let me tell you the story, how exactly I ended up here.

Schooling and Noob Blogger:
I did my schooling and +2 in Hyderabad. Then I wrote JEE and joined Civil Engineering Dual Degree course at IIT Madras in 2006, Chennai. I was not much interested in the course from the beginning.