Familiar with MJML? If you are not familiar, then check out my [tutorial on coding responsive emails with MJML](http://www.connorphillips.com/2016/03/08/creating-responsive-newsletters-with-the-mjml-email-framework/) before you read below. I have praised MJML in the past and I will do it again. I have yet to find a better responsive email framework and cannot even begin to count the numbers of hours that I have saved by using this platform when creating newsletters. The list of reasons why...

An underused feature of Google Sheets that I find to be a major reason to use the software over excel (yes I said it) is the IMPORTRANGE() Function. It is a function that doesn’t exist in other spreadsheet platforms and is specifically tied to the collaborative cloud-based capabilities that Google Sheets has to offer. Pass a Google Sheet Url ID and a specific range within that sheet to the function and next thing you know, the content of those cells appear in your current sheet...Wow, how amazin...

A fun challenge that I faced a few days was creating a weekday/weekend day index in Google sheets to count and index the number of weekdays/weekends in a month. This might sound like something easily achieved by placing a static value next to the date based on the preceding index value and day of the week, but the more this process has to be replicated, the more boring and tedious the task will become. This process is simply not for me as I hate manual excel work. As a result, I decided to take ...

This blog is geared toward the novice Google Analytics users who feel overwhelmed by concepts like filtering, segments and customs reports. My hope is that by the end of this post, I will be able to provide you with enough context on these concepts to give you the courage to use in these features in day to day work. Filters -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The “Filter” feature in Google Analytics is used to limit or modify collected pixel data b...

A continuation of part one, Better Data Reporting Practices - Gridless, Grouping, Layout Direction. Use Benchmarks This tip should be a given, but if you are not comparing your performance against some historical time series or relevant benchmark metric, then there will be no way for you to understand if your business is growing or shrinking. The decision on what type of benchmark you choose should be dictated by the data types being presented in the report. Some commonly used benchmar...

One of the most overlooked elements of reporting is data presentation. It is an afterthought compared to core reporting elements like data compilation and analysis largely due to its focus on aesthetics rather than computation. This focus may seem irrelevant to the general purpose of a report, which is to communicate compiled information, but if it is forgotten, then the door is left open to a communication breakdown. If this happens, then it is very likely that misinformed business decisions wi...

Starting a new AdWords account can be a very daunting task. Foreign concepts and metrics like keyword match types and quality score are not very intuitive to users who are new to digital marketing, making it is very easy to make mistakes and waste money in a short period of time. In a quest to help prevent costly mistakes right from the gate, I have thrown together five important tips for new users to watch for as they navigate through their account creation. 1. Structure is Key AdWords, like a...

Understanding how the user metric is measured in Google Analytics (GA) is a more complex process than its straightforward definition. In layman’s terms, a user, is a person who has visited a website within a reported time frame. Where this understanding gets more complex is when reporting criteria is layered into that count in GA and forces the metric to be processed in the form of a pre-aggregated table or recalculated based on the dimensions being used. It is not as simple as a static counting...

An overlooked and relatively under-documented feature of Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the ability to adjust the trigger type of a pageview trigger. The reason why this capability goes unnoticed to many is because the functionality is not as intuitive as the other custom trigger settings available and it is uncommon to have a lot cases that require varying pageview load scopes. While these reasons alone will make the common user avoid exploring deeper into the functionality, a recent issue I ran i...

There is a point in every business's life where an agreement must be made about which visit-based metric, sessions or users, should be used to calculate conversion rates at each step of a sales funnel. This metric is the leading barometer of performance and the first to be scrutinized for drops in performance. While it may seem like a schoolyard debate that ultimately has no major impact on business performance, standardizing one metric for reporting and understanding the differences in how they...