Google Analytics on Justin Carmony

Talk: DDM's Journey into Big Data with BigQuery with KSL and Deseret News - Salt Lake City GCP Meetup

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 20:00:48 +0000

I gave this presentation at the Salt Lake City Google Cloud Platform Meetup we hosted at Deseret Digital Media.

https://speakerdeck.com/justincarmony/ddms-journey-into-big-data-with-bigquery-with-ksl-and-deseret-news

We will hear from Justin Carmony, the Sr. Director of Engineering, Analytics at Deseret Digital Media.

This talk is part use-case and part intro into BigQuery.

Three years ago Deseret Digital Media had a serious problem: it had a lot of data in Google Analytics and Google Ad Manager (then called DFP), but couldn’t run the in-depth analysis needed because of limitations with their reporting tools. They had crucial questions they couldn’t answer, so they did what everyone else was doing: just guessing and hoping for the best.

Strategies for easier Google Analytics + BigQuery Analysis & Custom Dimensions

Tue, 22 May 2018 08:00:46 +0000

I’m a huge fan of BigQuery, and for Google Analytics 360 users you can automatically have your data go directly into BigQuery. It enabled advanced analysis not possible through the standard reporting tools, and you can join in other datasets you have in BigQuery with your Google Analytics data.

With BigQuery you can have nested structures, so each record in the Google Analytics dataset a visit. Nested inside each visit record is a hits nested record, which contains every pageview and event that occurred during that visit.

Cross-Domain Cookies with Google Analytics

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 09:03:09 +0000

At work, we’ve been trying to determine how much audience overlap we have between two of our main websites. We’ve migrated to Google Analytics Premium this year and are creating a “roll-up” property where all analytics from all of our properties gets rolled into one.

After enabling the roll-up, we tried to run reports on how many users visited both sites, but came back with 0 users. After doing some research we discovered Google Analytics by default will use first-party cookies to identify users. However, first-party cookies are not accessible (without crazy work arounds) across domains.