Occasionally I hear about someone wanting to be a web analyst. I’ve tried to mentor a few people and help many just with analytics.
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How to become a web analyst?
Web analytics
Practical articles on measurement strategy, data quality, analytics implementation and the long-term trustworthiness of data. I also cover unusual technical problems, original approaches and changes affecting how organisations measure and decide.
August 2026 update: The original article was published in 2016. The core idea still applies, but the GTM interface has changed, additional UTM parameters have been introduced, and, most importantly, we now use GA4 instead of Universal Analytics. Here is the most important update right at the beginning: if you only want to see campaigns […]
Updated August 8, 2026: Since December 11, 2025, Google Tag Manager has offered built-in Analytics Client ID, Analytics Session ID, and Analytics Session Number variables. For a custom cookie prefix and more precise session selection, you can use the user-defined Analytics Storage variable. The old _ga cookie parser is therefore no longer recommended. One-sentence recommendation: […]