You’re Not Avinash Kaushik

I came to the realization that unless you’re actually Avinash Kaushik, you know Google Analytics just about as much as the next guy, which isn’t necessarily a lot.

At a previous job I had I began to realize amongst the “experts” that worked with GA, there were conflicting opinions as to what various dimensions and metrics, reports and custom variables meant. And when Google Analytics upgraded to Universal Analytics, an entire swath of knowledge went out the window.

Now, given there’s documentation around how the various functions and features in GA, that didn’t stop any of my colleagues to come to a solid conclusion on what one thing or another meant.

Here’s an example, I created a series of reports to pull data from a website because these reports, individually, used a methodology distinct to the area it was culling. These reports were approved by three people, my manager, my GA vendor and a colleague on another team. These were THE reports the entire organization used to pull the data.

Now I was tasked with creating a comprehensive report for a site redesign and I used my GA reports to do this. Once the report was finished and given to the executive that requested the document another GA ‘expert’ refuted the report, claiming the methodology that I used, and was approved by three other stakeholders, was wrong.

In the world of Google Analytics, all the documentation in the world won’t settle turf battles and skirmishes when it comes to nuances of metrics, dimensions, reports and variables. Some days I really wished I worked with Avinash Kaushik.