What do you do if you want to know how many people visited a specific part (single page or subfolder) of your website? Very often people want to know this so they can report about it. A company can have multiple business units that all have their own subfolder on the company website, and they all want to know what their pages did. Or a campaign manager wants to know how many visits his action page attracted.

The first guess for most people would be to create this report with the Google Analytics Custom Report function:

Read more: Google Analytics visits per page »

We all know the horrible sign in Google Analytics that looks like this:

You want to analyze a bunch of data but because of that sign you know it will be sampled (incomplete) data. So, what is "sampling" exactly and how can you prevent it.

What is sampling

After Google Analytics gathered the raw unaggregated data that is being tracked by the tracking script it processes it to understandable and useful visit data. And with that visit data all available standard reports are pre-calculated and stored. That means for example that if you try to get the "Top Content" report, Google Analytics can show it to you in seconds because most of the calculations are already done.

Read more: How to prevent Google Analytics sampling data »

Often I get questions about how you can tell if a Google Analytics implementation is successful. People don't want to wait at least 4 to in some cases 24 hours before they see some data... or not. That's why I will tell you how I check this seconds after the codes are placed.

How does the tracking work

Google Analytics uses pixel tracking technology to send data to the Google servers. That means that the GATC (Google Analytics Tracking Script) will put a little image on the page that is being tracked. The URL of this image looks like this:

Read more: How to check real-time if a Google Analytics implementation works »

Last week I ran into an interesting situation. I wanted to create a profile for a specific subfolder in Google Analytics. And I only wanted the events that where launched from pages within that subfolder to be reported there. This graphic shows you the situation:

A visitor lands on the homepage, he than goes to the French subfolder (what is a virtual folder because the entire site is working with AJAX). And than he decides to read some Dutch texts to have a good laugh about the weird language. On both pages he prints out the text he found there, what is being measured with Google Analytics' event tracking system.

Nothing strange now right?

Read more: Google Analytics Event Tracking and Profile Filters »

An appropriate title for a new and refreshed blog, don't you think? At least, my focus was always on the Dutch speaking part of the world, and now I'm targeting the whole world (the English speaking part).

For people who don't know me, and there are a lot of them I once wrote some blogs on my friend Yoast his site. They were about tracking SEO rankings with Google Analytics. And it was reasonably succesful, I almost got a Semmy for it. Other cool thing is my Search Submit© tool, you must absolutely check it out.

The site still needs some work, some speed tweaks and some translation. The most popular Dutch articles will be translated to new English ones, the rest will stay in Dutch. And I already have some cool new posts queued up, ready to hit the RSS scrapers

So, what do you think? Do you like the new design and the new logo?