I am amazed at how little attention the new Google Data Studio has gotten. I’ve been working with complex systems out there; There are a ton of “data studios” which are extremely complex that need trained people to operate and deliver something (usually not that pretty) on the screen. The Google Data Studio is pretty simple and offers great integration of the default data sources, especially Google Analytics. More important they also offer Google Sheets support which means, everything you need to import you can simply import into Google Sheets (which has various Plugins for APIs) and then get it […]

In my opinion, IKEA is the master of the global gateway. I’ve come across their gateway through a book called “Global Gateways” years ago. And they still keep making their gateway better and better. The global gateway is the page that appears on ikea.com if you haven’t visited the page before. Actually it always appears, see rule 1. It’s where a visitor can choose which country website he wants to visit, e.g. the Canadian one, and which language he wants the site to be in, e.g. in French. It’s sole purpose is to get the visitor to get to the right version of the […]

For some reason, international websites love to produce a specific kind of duplicate content. Take the cat.com case. Caterpillar is a large industrial S&P 500 company with a huge website catering to customers all around the world. They have in particular the following sub websites: http://www.cat.com/en_GB.html for customers in Europe speaking english (though the URL implies it’s specifically targeted to Great Britain) http://www.cat.com/en_US.html for customers in North America speaking english (though again, the URL implies US) http://www.cat.com/en_MX.html for customers in Latin America speaking english Turns out, all three websites have almost identical content. Although there are few differences (an Investor page on the GB […]

What is the key to writing, organizing and designing great HTML mails? Really nailing plain text e-mails first. At least in my opinion. Besides you always need a plain text version of your e-mail. And it’s much easier to practice and understand the principles in a plain text e-mail. I also believe you should try to learn from great examples (which may have lots of little shortcomings) instead of reviewing what went wrong with bad examples. So here are three great examples of plain text e-mails. One from Google’s Think, the plain text version of a HTML mail, one from Jeff Fousts Space […]

After I went through the list of ways to stop spam in my last article, I decided to try to implement something even better. So in this post we will tackle the problem a little differently. We will stop the spam as early as possible through three different techniques. The first method is enough to stop all spam to my account currently. I’ll implement things with the Google Tag Manager, but any other TMS (Tealium or Adobe) will work just as well. The three methods are: A custom dimension to stop spammers to send hits to random Google Analytics accounts. A […]