Floods, Scroll Depth, Bonfire and lots of coffee: My first week at Measurelab

It’s been, without a doubt, an unusual first week. Upon arrival to the mind-blowing Old Candlemakers building in central Lewes, I walked into the office to see the team running up and down trying to clean up the mess: one of the roof windows was left open during the weekend and we ended up with a meeting room that looked more like a fish pond than a place to catch-up or meet clients. Fortunately, the guys were pretty quick and were able to fix things up fairly quickly and get cracking with the caffeine consumption and inbox clearing.

Being Web Analytics something relatively new for me, I started the week doing some reading and watching some videos of Justin Cutroni to refresh some of the basics and start prepping for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification – which I was kindly invited to take within a month of my start at Measurelab..no pressure..

However, by Wednesday, one of the first challenges came up (not weather-related this time): having seen the good performance of some of our how-to guides in our blog, Mark suggested to include scroll depth tracking into the blog so we could see how far down the page people were getting on each page and therefore be able to crosscheck with the visit duration to have a better understanding of the blog’s content performance. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Well, surprisingly, it was, because despite the fact that I’m not really familiar with Google Tag Manager I was able to get the whole thing up and running in “just” a couple of hours thanks to this great guide by Andy Gibson. If you have a basic knowledge of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, you should be able to get this done in just a few minutes though!

I should perhaps mention the fact that all this was done from home, as it was suggested to us to not get close to Lewes if we were not planning to stay for Bonfire Night. Apparently the locals love to set things on fire during the 5th of November and you are either in, or out. A little taste below:

Image credit to Ian Cumming at icimages.com

The rest of the week was fairly smooth, involving more of the Digital Fundamentals and Platform Principles videos in preparation for the GAIQ, Google Tag Manager and also a first go at a client’s GA account health check -or audit- which helped me realise the vast amount of information that can be extracted from a website with the correct implementation of GA and GTM. Coming from a Marketing/PR background, it’s fairly easy for me to see how all this information, if it’s well processed and digested, could be of invaluable help to take those data-driven decisions that could take a business to the next level.

And that’s about it..oh, sorry, the coffee bit…we have a nespresso coffee machine at work which, being a coffee addict as I am, it’s one of the reasons why I accepted the job. One tip though, stay away from the Caramelito and Vanillo capsules..

If you are on top of your work and have a couple of minutes to spare towards the end of the week, stay tuned for the next update, I’d be looking at shifting the conversation from coffee to web analytics as I get more acquainted with the trade 😉

P.S.: I don’t know who you are, but I will find you and check how much have you read of this post..thanks to scroll depth.