Notes on analytics and growth
How to measure what matters, find where people get stuck and turn clues into decisions — written for marketers, product teams and founders.
Latest posts
AI search & GEO4 min read
Visitors from ChatGPT: how to spot them, measure them and decide if they matter
More and more people ask an AI first and click through second. Where that traffic hides, how it differs from search, and how to tell how much it matters for your business.
Read article
Product notes3 min read
Why bot traffic gets its own report
By default we take identified bots out of your human reports rather than dropping them or mixing them in. The three reasons behind that, and what it means for your numbers.
Read article
Playbooks5 min read
Checkout drop-off: a seven-step investigation from data to fix
Plenty of add-to-carts, not many payments. A checklist to work through in order — rule out technical problems first, then find which step, which visitors and what cause.
Read article
Privacy & compliance4 min read
Does website analytics need a consent banner? Break it down by region and method
Whether you need a banner depends on three things — where your visitors are, what you collect and what else runs on your site. A framework to structure the question, not legal advice.
Read article
AI search & GEO4 min read
How many of your pages AI crawlers read — and why it doesn't match the visitors they send
One AI company read 8,000 of your pages last month and sent 40 people back. Is that normal? How to read the ratio between reading and returning, and what you can do about it.
Read article
Analytics basics3 min read
How ad clicks without UTM tags still get recognised
Ad platforms add a string of parameters to landing URLs on their own. Understand them and you'll see why "direct" traffic sometimes hides paid clicks — and how to get them back.
Read article
Marketing attribution4 min read
First, last, linear, position, time decay: what each attribution model answers
No attribution model is right or wrong — only suited or not to the question you're asking. One set of customer journeys, five models, five different answers about who gets the credit.
Read article
Product analytics6 min read
Reading retention curves: plateaus, cliffs and bounces
Some people look at a retention table and see product direction; others see a wall of percentages. Four common shapes, and the question to ask after each one.
Read article
Product analytics5 min read
Building your first funnel: a sign-up flow, step by step
Many teams' first funnel has a dozen steps and shows nothing. Using a SaaS sign-up flow, here's how to pick steps, set the window, and what to do once you've found the problem.
Read article
Marketing attribution4 min read
A UTM naming convention your whole team will follow
Three rows called facebook, Facebook and fb aren't a tool problem, they're a naming problem. Five rules and one sheet that make everyone's links come out the same.
Read article
Privacy & compliance4 min read
Cookieless visitor counts: how accurate are they?
Does cookieless analytics over- or under-count? Where it makes almost no difference, where you should read the numbers differently — with concrete examples.
Read article
Analytics basics4 min read
A high bounce rate isn't always bad: two kinds of bounce
The same 70% bounce rate can be perfectly healthy on a blog and money down the drain on a landing page. Tell the two apart before you try to fix anything.
Read article