Metrics
What each analytics number really means, and where it misleads. Bounce rate, sessions, engagement time, conversion rate — these guides define the metrics precisely, explain how GA4 changed several definitions, and show which ones deserve a place on a dashboard.
13 guides on metrics.
A/B Testing in Web Analytics: Getting Significance Right
Why 'variant B is winning' usually means nothing, how to compute significance for conversion tests, and the two mistakes — peeking and tiny samples — that make most A/B results fiction.
Why Did Traffic Drop? Joining SERP Data with Your Analytics
Web analytics knows what happened to a page; a SERP API knows what happened in search. Neither explains the link. How to join them into a plain-English cause, and why an honest 'not search' answer matters.
Collecting Heatmap Data Without Drowning Your Database
Click heatmaps generate far more events than pageviews. Coordinate normalisation, scroll-depth milestones instead of continuous tracking, and aggregating early so the raw stream stays affordable.
Website Analytics Metrics Explained: What Each One Really Means
A reference for the core web analytics metrics — pageviews, sessions, users, bounce and exit rate, engagement, conversion — how each is defined and where each misleads.
Counting Live Visitors Accurately
'Active now' sounds trivial and is not. Choosing the activity window, why heartbeats beat pageviews, deduplicating across tabs, and keeping the query cheap enough to run every ten seconds.
Sessionization Without Cookies
Defining a session when you cannot set a cookie. Daily-rotating identifiers, the 30-minute inactivity rule in SQL, and honest limits on cross-device and cross-day continuity.
Cohort Retention Analysis in SQL: Building the Triangle Chart
How to compute cohort retention from raw events — the classic triangle table, N-day vs unbounded retention, and reading the curve without fooling yourself.
Click Heatmaps and Scroll Depth: Reading What Users Actually Do
How click, move, and scroll heatmaps are captured and rendered, what rage clicks and dead clicks reveal, and how to act on the patterns without over-reading them.
UTM Parameters: A Complete Guide to Campaign Tracking
What each UTM parameter means, naming conventions that survive scale, common tagging mistakes, and how UTM data flows into attribution reports.
Funnel Analysis: Finding Where Your Users Actually Drop Off
How to build conversion funnels that reveal real drop-off — choosing steps, strict vs loose ordering, attribution windows, segmenting, and avoiding the survivorship traps.
What Is a Good Bounce Rate? (And Why the Metric Misleads You)
How bounce rate is actually calculated, what counts as good by page type, why GA4 changed the definition, and the cases where a high bounce rate is fine.
SQL Window Functions for Sessionization and Funnel Analysis
How to turn a raw event stream into sessions, paths, and funnels using LAG, SUM OVER, and gap-and-island techniques — with runnable DuckDB SQL.
Monitoring Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) From Your Own Analytics
Learn what Core Web Vitals are, the thresholds Google uses, and how to monitor LCP, CLS, and INP from real users with self-hosted, privacy-first analytics.