Marketers are flooded with metrics: campaign performance, customer data, A/B test results, and more. But what happens when you dig beyond averages? The five-number summary is a statistical tool that gives you a deeper view of your data’s distribution—allowing you to spot outliers, skew, and hidden patterns that averages alone miss. In this post, we’ll break down the five-number summary, walk through a marketing-focused example, and show you exactly how to use it to improve decision-making and communication with stakeholders. What Is the Five-Number Summary? The five-number summary consists of: This summary is the basis for box plots, a visualization

The Data Display Events page within the Settings > Property Settings of Google Analytics is a powerful feature often overlooked. It’s essential to review it regularly, ideally every six months, to ensure your data is accurate and comprehensive. Below is an example of the events setup on my Google Analytics account, which are largely default events. I’ve used a 90-day comparison, sorting them in descending order by event count for clarity. It’s important to note that Google Analytics does not allow you to rename or delete events once they’ve been created, so setting them up correctly from the beginning is

In my page session tracking post, I covered what I consider the most important website analytics report: page sessions. Now, I want to cover what I believe is the second most valuable report—sessions by channel. Since I’ve only recently started focusing on my website, my channel data isn’t impressive yet, but it’s enough to highlight the insights this report provides. I also don’t have any Paid Search or Email traffic yet, which are common channels for most websites. Historically, businesses focused on a single channel. That expanded into multi-channel marketing, and today, omnichannel is the goal. Success in all your

Remember the classic question: “What’s the one thing you’d bring with you if stranded on a desert island?” Let’s apply a similar thought experiment to website analytics. If you could only have one report to manage your website, what would it be? For me, it’s a trending report that shows page session tracking by month—as illustrated in the table below. Why Sessions Is the Right Metric In this scenario, we’re not dealing with an eCommerce website, so metrics like revenue, orders, or units don’t apply. I also wouldn’t choose user or visitor metrics because frequent cookie deletions make unique or

Rarely do I want to keep my data inside the source where it originates. This is absolutely the case with my Google Analytics data. I needed a solution that met the following criteria: After exploring multiple options, I discovered that Google Sheets, combined with the SyncWith extension, met my needs perfectly. SyncWith offers 35 monthly refreshes for free, which is more than sufficient for my requirements. Setting this up was fairly straightforward taking minutes, not hours. Here are the steps I took to get this implemented using the Google Analytics add-on in Google Sheets. Why Export Data from Google Analytics