For content sites, web analysts often look at engagement-related metrics to try to assess whether or not visitors are having a successful visit. After all, there is no transaction like a purchase, to tell us that something “good” happened, if not for our visitor then at least for our business. We may look at metrics [...]

I found out recently that visitors using Internet Explorer 8 on a site that is not compatible with that browser, can exhibit multiple user agent strings during one visit. This is because of a compatibility view provided in IE8 that makes it look and act mostly (but not exactly) like IE7, for sites that don’t [...]

If you are a web analyst, and you have ever had to Google “zoo porn” as part of your job, you would understand why I loathe the idea of targeted advertising based on user searches. The terms I’ve searched as part of my job have gotten me on the net-nanny list of every employer I’ve [...]

There are differing opinions on how to label the metric historically known as “Unique Visitors”. On one side of the fence are those who think it should be relabeled “Unique Cookies”, since that is the most popular method used for calculations. On the other side of the fence are others who think the metric is [...]