Ope, hello there!
Greetings from Ohio! I’m Emma Anderson, and I’ve worked as a web analytics consultant since Jan. 2019. I spend most of my workdays creating custom solutions for GA4 migrations when Google’s pre-supplied events and parameters just won’t cut it. I’m a puzzle-solver, an aspiring master coder, and I want to help others on a similar path.
My Path so Far
Before discovering web analytics, I served as a legal advocate at a local domestic violence non-profit agency. Due to my natural mathematical proclivity and abilities, the executive director eventually set me to work on aggregating data for grant reports. I soon realized I was probably in the wrong line of work if my favorite part of the day was learning Excel VBA. I consulted with a digital marketing agency to handle their monthly reporting and have yet to look back.
The Goal
The metamorphosis from social work to digital analytics started gradually and with insufficient external support. One C++ class wasn’t enough for analytics blogs like Jim Gordon’s and Simo Ahava’s. The step-by-step “how to” tutorials and accompanying pictures do wonders…if you can meet their advanced coding, web analytics, and web design knowledge thresholds. Resources for programming, such as W3Schools, are superb at building skills from nothing. The vast amount of content is overwhelming without Google or Adobe Analytics application examples.
I saw a gap. A moderately-sized hole that should’ve been easier to cross than it was. It took landing a full-time analytics job with mentorship from industry experts to feel I was finally moving past the basics in Google’s Skillshop courses.
Web analytics could and should be more accessible than that. This blog aims to identify focused, precise web design and coding principles, introduce the principles’ fundamentals, and demonstrate how these tools enable analysts to go beyond what GA4 provides out of the box. The targeted audience is anyone with enough GA4 knowledge to be certified and sufficient coding familiarity to understand basic concepts such as loops, functions, and methods.
I’m excited to see where this goes and am grateful for your interest in my work. I’m all ears if you have any questions, suggestions, or ideas or want to make a guest appearance! Feel free to hunt me down on LinkedIn or reach out from this site.
Until then, stay awesome, everyone!
