Have you ever needed to merge multiple CSV files with millions of rows?  If you search online, you'll find how to do so either with Power Query in Excel, or through Unix cat or Windows copy, or even with some custom Python script.  However, all of these methods come with there own issues.

With Power Query you have to do a lot of up front setup with a custom source directory and setting custom column rules to be merged and later will need to clean up the duplicate headers that it will pull over into your merged sheet.  I won't attempt to explain how this works because I've never had to do so, but know you will have to be somewhat comfortable with advanced Excel skills to do this.  However, even if you know how to do this you will encounter the issue with a max row count of 1,048,576 rows that Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013 support.

With Unix cat or Windows copy it's as simple as a one line command:

Unix: cat *.csv > merged.csv

Windows: copy *.csv merged.csv

The problem with this solution is that you will be left with duplicate headers showing up throughout the merged.csv file.  It's even worse if your CSV files have inconsistent headers.  If this is the case you cannot just simply combine the files because then you will have the merged.csv file completely out of whack as you could imagine.

What's left to do is come up with your own custom Python script or even Unix awk to handle the most custom of needs, but who wants to do that?  What if you have no experience with programming and need a quick solution?

In comes Mighty Merge an online tool to quickly and easily merge multiple CSV files.  You simply drag and drop as many CSV files onto the page and press Merge.

The whole process takes seconds to complete.  The most amazing thing about this tool is that no files are uploaded at all.  Everything happens locally in your browser safely and secure.  Mighty Merge auto-magically removes duplicate headers and auto-aligns all inconsistent headers.  So even if your CSV files have no columns in common, the final merged file will still line up all your columns perfectly.  As a bonus Mighty Merge will even join two CSV files horizontally based on a common column key.  Useful for when you have two CSV that are missing column information (e.g. joining a CSV file with product information, but perhaps missing a description column you have in another file).

Enjoy!  

Recently, I've had to design creative Ads for websites I'm sponsoring for Analytics Bar.  Designing creative ads is definitely not my strong suit and to help me design a "perfect" Ad I wanted to be able to visually preview how my Ad would look on the exact web page my Ad would show up for sponsorship.   However, with this strategy, there is no easy way to do this, especially trying to test multiple images.  

In Chrome and other modern browsers there is no easy way to do this due to security reasons.  You cannot just open up developer tools and manually update an img tag src attribute with your local file path of "file:///C:/Ads/AB-Ad-test1.png".

It just doesn't work.  You can either open yourself up to vulnerabilities by disabling this feature in Chrome or run a local web server which then you can edit an img tag src attribute with a real url "http://localhost:8080/AB-Ad-test1.png".  

However, even if you could manually edit html to include your local files, that is still too tedious.  I wished for a better way. And now there is!  In comes Image Injector a chrome extension I created for this exact problem that allows you to simply drag and drop any local image file onto any web page safely and secure.  Depending on where you drop the file it will either replace an image already on screen or places a re-sizable image on the web page that you can then move around anywhere on the screen:) Hope you enjoy!

By Google's own definition a "Hit" is any user interaction which results in data being sent to google analytics servers.  The most common of these hit types include page tracking hits, event tracking hits, and eCommerce hits.

Website owners use Google Analytics tracking code (embedded on their page) to trigger specific user behavior (better known as events) which are recorded through Google Analytics servers of said activity (for example, when a user loads the page of a website, it's considered a pageview event).  Also, beyond tracking just websites, hit events can be configured to track from mobile apps as well (for example, a screenview hit).

In summary, the most common hit types include, but not limited to:

• Page tracking hits (e.g. pageview)
• Event tracking hits (e.g. link clicks, page scrolling)
• eCommerce tracking hits (e.g. transaction and item data capturing)
• Social interaction hits (e.g. Facebook like button click)

More information from Google Support: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6086082

For specific details on various hit types and how they are used in Google Analytics tracking code: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/field-reference#hitType

I'm excited to announce this ☝ is the first in a series of side projects I'm working on or have worked on, all being developed for my own personal reasons "scratching my own itch".  My hope is that you will find some of these projects extremely useful in some way or another.

As many of you know one of the best tools for tuning SQL queries is by SET STATISTICS IO, TIME ON.  It gives you tons of information (e.g. Scan count, Physical Reads, Logical Reads, Execution times, etc.). However the information provided in the Messages tab is extremely uneasy to read.  There are already great tools in the wild for this (e.g. Vicky Harp's offline spreadsheet and Richie Rump's StatisticsParser.com), but I wanted to take it a step further by applying to SSMS entirely. That way you don't have to go anywhere else to see the results.

Without further ado I present to you the following:  

On the main landing page for AnalyticsBar.com I have lots of links that basically serve as scrolling links for transitioning our visitors further down the page to specific sections (e.g. Features, Download, Contact, etc.) and even opening purchase forms and I had no way to track these with a basic Google Analytics setup...easily.  

In comes Google Tag Manager:)

Now I'm not going to go into much detail about what Google Tag Manager is all about, but know this, it's a very useful interface for adding custom tracking events to a page without having to directly manipulate any code on your current pages! Yay! However, this does not mean you won't have to code anything because you do, but only in Google Tag Manager.  With that said, I'm going to show you this very useful example of how to setup Google Tag Manager to start tracking any and all links you have on any page using custom JavaScript.

Before we begin let's first setup Google Tag Manager if you haven't already

Goto https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/tag-manager/

Sign in to Tag Manager or Start for free

Create Account

Setup Account: Enter your Account Name

Setup Container: Enter the name of your website

That's It! You're done setting up Google Tag Manager that doesn't do anything...yet:)

Now for the real work. Let's start tracking clicks!!!

Step 1: Add our very first, really simple, Built-In Variable we'll need to start handling clicked elements

Click on Variables and Select Configure

Check Click Element

Step 2: We need to create our very first variable to link our Google Analytics tracking ID with the actual click events we're going to start tracking

Click Variables and New (User-Defined Variables)

Enter the variable name "Google Analytics - UA ID" and click on Google Analytics Settings

Enter the UA tracking ID found in your Google Analytics account page for your website (e.g. from https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/)

Step 3: Now comes the code! Create a new Custom JavaScript variable function for finding the nearest anchor tag '<a>' from clicks on a page

Click Variables and New (User-Defined Variables)

Note: Variables are useful resources that evaluate to a specific value for whatever you need (e.g. the URL of a page, HTTP Referrer, etc., or in our case we're creating custom variable functions to evaluate custom values)

Enter the variable name "Find closest" and click Custom JavaScript

Enter your very first JavaScript

function() { return function(target, selector) { while (!target.matches(selector) && !target.matches('body')) { target = target.parentElement; } return target.matches(selector) ? target : undefined; } }

Note: What this function does is starting at the target (clicked element) search for the selector item (e.g. for <a> tags it would be 'a'). If the selector is not the target then move to the parent object of the target until you find it otherwise it's undefined

Step 4: Utilizing the "Find closest" code above, we need to create yet another function that will find our <a> tags and return the HREF value of the clicked anchor link.

Again...Click Variables and New (User-Defined Variables)

Enter the variable name "Get anchor href" and click Custom JavaScript

Enter the following JavaScript

function() { var el = {{Find closest}}({{Click Element}}, 'a'); return typeof el !== 'undefined' ? el.href : undefined; }

Note: What this code does is utilize the "Find closest" function and passes the parameter {{Click Element}} as target, and 'a' as the selector we're searching for in "Find closest". If the anchor link is found, we'll return the value of HREF.

Step 5: Very similar to the step above, we also want to get the innerText of the <a> tag

Yet again...Click Variables and New (User-Defined Variables)

Enter the variable name "Get anchor innerText" and click Custom JavaScript

Enter the following JavaScript

function() { var el = {{Find closest}}({{Click Element}}, 'a'); return typeof el !== 'undefined' ? el.innerText : undefined; }

Note: What this code does is utilize the "Find closest" function and passes the parameter {{Click Element}} as target, and 'a' as the selector we're searching for in "Find closest". If the anchor link is found, we'll return the value of innerText.

Step 6: With all of our custom JavaScript variable functions in place now, we can finally setup our event triggers to start triggering based on the value returned from our custom functions.

Click Triggers and New

Enter the trigger name "All anchor clicks" and click All Elements

Set the trigger to fire on "Some Clicks". From the first drop down choose the Custom JavaScript variable "Get anchor href". Second drop down select "does not equal". Enter "undefined" in the last box.

Note: If it's not clear, what this does is sets this trigger to fire when "Get anchor href" evaluates to a real value, basically meaning it found an <a> tag from the clicked event.

Step: 7: Finally, we can create our official event tag for tracking the triggered event from above.

Click Tags and New

Enter the tag name "GA Event - Clicks - Nearest Anchor Tags" and click Google Analytics - Universal Analytics

Set the Track Type to Event.  Enter a category name.  Set the Action to "Click: {{Get anchor href}}".  Set the Label to "{{Get anchor innerText}}: {{Get anchor href}}".  Lastly, set Google Analytics Settings to the variable "{{Google Analytics - UA ID}}"

Note: This is where we actually set out event labels that will be stored and visible in Google Analytics for tracking these events.  The amazing thing is these values will evaluate our custom JavaScript variables into the event values!

Select Triggering

Click on our custom trigger "All anchor clicks"

Note: The tag configuration from above will be set and fire off the event once this trigger occurs on your web pages.

Step 8: Last step. Submit and Publish!

Let's Submit!

Add your version name and description, then Publish!

Click on the tag Admin and click Install Google Tag Manager

Add the following code right below your other Google Analytics script that you're already using for tracking page views

That's It! You're All Done.

Now start tracking your custom click events of your super awesome website within Google Analytics https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/.

So here you are with a website, blog, or something cool you've built online. Now what? Well, it's time to start tracking your visitors and what better way to do that than with the all mighty Google Analytics. Here I'll guide you through this super simple setup.

Step 1: Get signed up

Goto https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/

Sign in to Analytics or Start for free

Sign up

Step 2: Create an account and setup your first tracking property details

Right out of the gate Google Analytics has you set up your account and very first tracking property for your website

Enter your Account Name

Enter the Website Name and Website URL you want to start tracking users from

Get Tracking ID

Step 3: Copy your new Google Analytics script tags

Step 4: Add your new Google Analytics script tags to the very top of your website right after the <head> tag

That's It! You're Done.

Now start tracking your visitors to your super awesome website. Bookmark https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/ to jump straight to Google Analytics reporting goodies!