1. •Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur elit, sed de eiusmod
Digital Analytics Hacks For The Masses

2. Digital Analytics Hacks For The Masses
There are not enough hours in the day! Learn and share hacks and time-saving techniques, to help you maximize your day.
Michele Kiss
@michelejkiss
Senior Partner
Analytics Demystified

3. 1
2
The goal of
our session
I share some of my tips
You share yours!

4. 01
Use Google Sheets to
manipulate data

5. When you can’t read your data…

6. =DETECTLANGUAGE(A2)
Google Sheets to the rescue!

7. =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A2,B2,"en")
Google Sheets to the rescue!
Which field you’d
like to translate
Language you’re
translating FROM
Language you’re
translating TO

8. CASE
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Event Label,"iemand.gezien.*niet.herkent|volto
sconosciuto") THEN "Type 1"
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Event Label,"bekend gezicht") THEN "Type 2"
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Event Label,"gehoord|suono") THEN "Type 5"
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Event Label,"qualcuno|volto|quelqu.un") THEN "Type 4"
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(Event Label,"gezien|misschien|activiteit|attivit.")
THEN "Type 5"
ELSE "Other" END
Google Sheets to the rescue!

9. Convert GA’s funky 20190722 date format (Thanks Annie Cushing!)
=DATE(LEFT(H7,4),MID(H7,5,2),RIGHT(H7,2)
)
Other useful formulas

10. REGEXREPLACE, REGEXMATCH and REGEXEXTRACT
Other useful formulas

11. Example use case: Separate regional URLs
Reg Ex

12. CASE WHEN
REGEXP_CONTAINS(hits.page.pagePath,"/[a-z]{2}/[a-z]{2}/")
THEN
REGEXP_REPLACE(hits.page.pagePath,"/[a-z]{2}/[a-z]{2}/","/")
WHEN REGEXP_CONTAINS(hits.page.pagePath,"/[a-z]{2}/") THEN
REGEXP_REPLACE(hits.page.pagePath,"/[a-z]{2}/","/")
ELSE hits.page.pagePath END
AS PagePathMinusLocale,
Reg Ex Contains and Replace

13. What others do you find useful?

14. Using Spreadsheets to
build repetitive SQL
02

15. So tedious…

16. Make it a little easier

17. 03
Fix bad data!
Using Adobe Analytics calculated metrics to fix bad data

18. Who has seen negative revenue...
Major revenue issues…
● Order revenue recorded was grossly inflated or negative
● Duplicate purchase event (on the wrong page), double counting revenue
● Donations counting as “revenue” (instead of in a separate event)

19. Adobe Calculated Metrics to the rescue!

20. First, create a “Valid Orders” segment
Requires:
● Correct product category
● Purchase be fired on the proper
confirmation page
● Order was not be one of the
known “outlier” orders
(identified by the Purchase ID)

21. Create your “Revenue (Corrected)” metric
Create a calculated metric:

22. Magic!
Voila! Problem solved:

23. 04
Using Data Studio for
Google Analytics Alerts

24. Who finds these useless?

25. I’ve moved to Data Studio
A few key metrics
per client/site
Sends daily

26. (We’re
actually pretty
good pattern
detectors)

27. 05
Share cleaner screenshots
Want someone to “see what you see” on a report?
Need to anonymize a screenshot for a blog post?

28. 01
Share cleaner screenshots

29. 01
Share cleaner screenshots
What do you want users to look at?

30. 01
Share cleaner screenshots
Hide menus Keep important info, like which View the
data is coming from, or the fact that it’s
not segmented
Call out the
metric(s) of
importance

31. Share cleaner screenshots
Add call outs

32. Redact information

33. Redact information
“Blur” is my friend!

34. 06
Data Studio Dashboard…
… of your Data Studio Dashboards!

35. “Does anyone even use this report?”

36. Data Studio “Meta Dash”

37. Add GA Tracking to every DS reports
(I use a separate property for each client)

38. Clean up GA data
URLs captured are going to be gibberish
Page Title is going to be your best bet for
easy-to-understand data

39. Uh-oh, we have a consistency problem
Reports with multiple pages
Reports with only one page

40. Page Title + >
CONCAT(Page Title," ›")
What it does: Appends “>” to the end of all Page Titles. Now every page title
contains at least one “>”
If a report has multiple pages, it will end up reading Report Name > Page
Name > but that’s fine – we’re never going to actually use that value.
Let’s fix it

41. Let’s fix it
Page Title Combined
CASE
WHEN REGEXP_MATCH(Page Title,".*›.*")
THEN Page Title
ELSE Page Title + >
END
What it does: Chooses which value to use – the original Page Title, or the one
created by Formula 1. Where there is already a “>” in the Page Title, it will use
the original Page Title. If there is no “>”, it will use the Formula 1.

42. Woo hoo!
Report Name – Final
REGEXP_EXTRACT(Page Title Combined,'(.*).*›.*')
What it does: Extract everything before “>”
This will give you just the “Report Name”, for every Page Title, regardless of
the number of pages and the presence (or absence) of “>” in the original Page
Title
(Why so many formulas? I tried combining them in to one uber-formula, and
unfortunately Data Studio could not cope with that kind of adversity.)

43. Final Report
Click a report
to see the
most popular
pages below
See where
people are
accessing the
report(s) from
(Proxy for
which office
they work in, or
what team
they’re on.)

44. (You still can’t send PII)

45. 07
Using Data Studio to recreate
Channel definitions

46. 1
2
3
4
In-built Channel
Definitions are (a
necessary)
Not retroactive
Tedious to create and maintain
Painful to scale
evil

47. Define Channels in Data Studio

48. They execute in order

49. 08
Use Sparklines
for quick visuals

50. Use Google Sheets in-built Sparklines
formulas to add “mini trends” to data tables,
or create quick visual funnels:
=SPARKLINE(B2,{"charttype",
"bar";"color1",$B$15;"max",
$B$14})
Sparklines
Set automatic
max to 10%
higher than
your biggest
value
Control hex code
from one place

51. Let’s share!

52. Michele Kiss
Email
michele@analyticsdemystified.com
Measure Chat
join.measure.chat
michelejkiss
Twitter
@michelejkiss