Dense business essays and tech insights, written where experience meets code.
A guide for anyone who feels lost after installing GA4 and doesn't know where to look. Covers the 5 reports to open first, from Realtime to Traffic acquisition and User acquisition, and the 5 traps beginners fall into most often.
A beginner's guide to GA4 attribution. Why user scope and session scope show different #1 channels, the four retired models and the data-driven attribution (DDA) that remains, the key event lookback window (30/90 days), and how to read first touch and last touch together.
How to manage tags with Google Tag Manager (GTM) without touching code. Covers the container, tag, trigger, and variable concepts, dataLayer, preview and version control, and the four mistakes beginners make most often.
A UTM parameter is a set of five tags appended to a link that tells an analytics tool like GA4 which channel, medium, and campaign a visitor came through. From the 3 required fields (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) to 5 common mistakes, all in one guide.
How to measure ad channel effectiveness without individual tracking. Covers why a 0.15 correlation was an illusion, the baseline, lift, and adstock (advertising carryover effect) concepts, and the time-series data you need to start stacking today.
What the dark funnel is, why so much traffic ends up logged as "direct," and 6 ways to track it, from UTM discipline to surveys, brand search volume, and experiments, laid out as an explainer guide.
How to self-diagnose where your company's marketing data is missing, using five layers (supply, demand expression, acquisition, conversion ledger, confirmation) and 15 questions. Includes a map of the whole series onto the five layers.
For free, you can see search interest (a relative value) in Naver DataLab, while actual monthly search volume (an absolute value) is checked in the Naver Search Ads Keyword Tool. Covers the principles behind Search Console, Search Advisor, DataLab, and Google Trends.
The Meta Pixel is JavaScript that observes visitor behavior and sends it to ad platform servers. Click IDs like gclid and fbclid match a click to a later conversion, and server-side methods like the Conversions API bypass the browser to recover conversions cookies would otherwise miss.
A GA4 session is a bundle of interactions cut off after 30 minutes of inactivity, and the user count isn't a count of people, it's a count of browser-level cookies (client_id). A ground-up rundown of the basics: cookies, sessions, events, and GA4.
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