Blog

• 
  Analytics Basics Anonymous Visitor Tracking: What You Can and Cannot Know

  Anonymous visitor tracking records what visits do without tying them to a named person, and it is the default for almost all analytics. Anonymously you still learn how many came, from where, on what device, roughly where, and which pages, just not who. Cookieless tracking replaces the browser cookie with a first-party ID or a daily hash, which matters because Safari and Firefox already block third-party cookies by default. The line between anonymous and identified tracking is consent, not capability.

• 
  Analytics Basics How to Count Unique Visitors, and Why Tools Disagree

  A unique visitor is one browser counted once over a period. Google Analytics 4 has no metric called unique visitors; use Users, and Active users is the default count of unique users who engaged. New users are browsers seen for the first time. Two analytics tools never match because they filter bots differently (bots are now over half of all web traffic), identify returning visitors differently, draw time windows differently, and get blocked at different rates. Pick one tool and follow its trend.

• 
  Visitor Tracking What a Visitor Tracker Actually Shows You

  A website visitor tracker turns invisible traffic into a few readable views: how many people came, where from, on what device, from where in the world, which pages they saw, and how engaged they were. Google Analytics has a User Explorer report that shows a single anonymous visitor's event stream, but it is a browser ID, not a named person. What no aggregate tracker shows is the individual: who a specific visitor was, their full path, and why they left.

• 
  Visitor Tracking How to Track Visitors on Your Website

  To track visitors, you install an analytics tool: paste one snippet of code, or add a plugin, and it records each visit. It tells visitors apart with a cookie, a small file in the browser holding an ID, so remember that it counts browsers, not people, and undercounts anyone who blocks trackers. A unique visitor is one browser counted once in a period. Google Analytics 4 does not use the phrase unique visitors; it calls the same thing Active users.

• 
  UTM & Campaign Links UTM Parameters for Email and Newsletters

  For email and newsletter links, always set the medium to email. The most common mistake is using newsletter as the medium, which Google does not recognise, so the traffic disappears into an Unassigned bucket. Newsletter is fine as the source. Watch for your email tool auto-adding its own tags on top of yours, keep long links tidy with a shortener that passes the tags through, and never put a recipient's email address in the link, since it leaks and hurts deliverability. Use a revocable per-person token instead.

• 
  UTM & Campaign Links Should You Put UTM Tags on Internal Links?

  Do not put UTM tags on links between your own pages. UTMs are for traffic arriving from somewhere else, and on an internal link they corrupt the attribution of a visitor you already had. In GA4 the stale tag gets inherited by that person's next visit; older guides say it starts a new session, but that describes Universal Analytics, retired in 2023. To see how people move around your site, use analytics events or a per-person path view, not UTMs.

• 
  UTM & Campaign Links Where to Find Your UTM Data in Google Analytics

  Your UTM data lives in one Google Analytics report: Reports, then Acquisition, then Traffic acquisition. It opens grouped by broad channels, so switch the dimension to Session source / medium to see your actual source and medium, or Session campaign for your campaign. utm_content and utm_term are not in the standard reports at all; you have to build an Exploration to see them. And if you see nothing, it is usually just too soon, since standard reports can lag a day or two while the Realtime report updates fast.

• 
  Analytics Basics What Does UTM Stand For? The Urchin Story

  UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. Urchin was a web analytics company that Google bought in 2005 and turned into Google Analytics. The company is long gone, but its initials survive on every tagged link and in Google Analytics' old tracking cookies. Knowing this mostly does one useful thing: it stops the letters looking technical, so you can focus on the part that actually matters, choosing a medium value Google recognises.

• 
  UTM & Campaign Links Tracking URL Examples for Reddit, X, Email and More

  A tracking URL is your normal link with labels like utm_source and utm_medium on the end. The source is the place you posted it, named however you like. The medium is the channel type, and it must match a value Google recognises, so use social for organic Reddit, X and LinkedIn, referral for Product Hunt and Hacker News, email for newsletters, and paid_social for ads. Made-up values like community send your traffic to a bucket called Unassigned, where it vanishes from your reports.

• 
  UTM & Campaign Links What a UTM Tracking Code Is and How It Works

  A UTM tracking code is not code and needs no developer. It is just text added to the end of a web address, like a label saying where a visitor came from. When someone clicks, the page loads normally and the analytics already on the destination site reads those labels and files them. The credit lasts a 30-minute session, and a later signup can still be traced back for 30 to 90 days. If you see six months quoted, that is the old Universal Analytics figure, not the current one.