Michael Crawford Every GA4 property I have audited that lacks a tracking plan has the same problems: duplicate events with different names, missing parameters, and reports that do not answer the one question the CMO actually asked. A tracking plan prevents all of this. A tracking plan (sometimes called a measurement plan or analytics brief) is a … Read more
A marketing dashboard pulls your scattered data into a single screen so you can answer one question fast: is what we are doing working? That sounds simple, but in my experience, most dashboards fail within a few weeks. They get built with too many metrics, no clear audience, and no connection to decisions anyone actually … Read more
Third-party cookies are going away. Safari killed them years ago with Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Firefox followed with Enhanced Tracking Protection. Chrome has been winding down support through its Privacy Sandbox initiative. The result: the tracking infrastructure most marketing teams built over the past decade is breaking down. In my experience working with dozens of marketing … Read more
What Are UTM Parameters? UTM parameters (Urchin Tracking Module) are short text tags you append to the end of a URL. When someone clicks that tagged link, your analytics tool — whether it’s GA4, Adobe Analytics, or anything else — reads those tags and records exactly where that visitor came from, which campaign sent them, … Read more
What Is Google Tag Manager? Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that lets you add and manage tracking codes — called tags — on your website without editing the source code. Instead of asking a developer to hardcode every pixel, analytics snippet, or conversion tag, you install GTM once and manage everything through … Read more
What Is A/B Testing? A/B testing (also called split testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage, email, ad, or any digital experience to determine which one performs better. You show version A (the control) to one group of users and version B (the variation) to another, then measure which version produces … Read more
Why Attribution Models Matter A customer sees your Facebook ad, clicks a Google search result a week later, then converts through an email link. Which channel gets credit? The answer depends on your attribution model — the ruleset that assigns conversion credit to marketing touchpoints. Get attribution wrong, and you’ll cut budgets from channels that … Read more
The GA4 Event Model: A Mental Shift If you’re coming from Universal Analytics, GA4’s event-based model requires a mindset change. In UA, you had sessions, pageviews, and events as separate concepts. In GA4, everything is an event. A page view? That’s a page_view event. A scroll? scroll event. A purchase? purchase event. This unified model … Read more
Why Most SEO Reports Fail I’ve reviewed hundreds of SEO reports over the years. Most of them share the same problem: they’re packed with data but empty on meaning. A typical failing report looks like this: The executive reading this has one question: So what? The problem isn’t the data—it’s the disconnect from business results. … Read more
