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Growth Detectives

Growth Detectives

Written by: Krzysztof Planeta
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Join your host, Krzysztof (Chris) Planeta, as he shares his growth techniques and uncovers the secrets of staying ahead of the competition in an increasingly competitive world of online business.

Become a growth detective and learn how to uncover new opportunities using actionable data, make data-driven decisions and optimize your offer.

Welcome to the "Growth Detectives" podcast.

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Krzysztof (Chris) Planeta is the developer of WP Full Picture plugin for marketers and data-driven website owners.

Krzysztof Planeta Economics Leadership Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Will Google Analytics 5 ever come out? Ep. 1 | Season 2

    Will Google Analytics 5 ever come out? Ep. 1 | Season 2
    Aug 14 2025

    For nearly two decades, Google Analytics has been the go-to tool for marketers and data analysts.

    But, as we get toward AI-powered search and privacy-first data collection, one question is quietly emerging: will there even be a Google Analytics 5?
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    4 mins
  • How to track 50% more traffic | Ep. 10

    How to track 50% more traffic | Ep. 10
    Jan 31 2024

    The 2 main things that limit the number of people you track are:
    1. Cookie consent banners
    2. Ad blockers

    Depending on the profile of your visitors these things alone, can stop you from tracking more than half of your visitors. In this episode of Growth Detectives show I am going to tell you how you can prevent that from happening.

    So, let's start with consent banners.

    The truth is that privacy laws in over 60 countries require that website owners ask their visitors for consent before tracking. This consent should be given by clicking a button in a consent banner. Unfortunately, a big portion of visitors do not do that. And as a result, they cannot be tracked.

    So what to do about it? Should you just disrespect that and risk being fined?

    There is a better solution.

    The thing is you need to ask visitors for consent only when you want to track personal information about them and / or use techniqies that can identify them. One of them is cookies, from hich the banners took their name. However there are in fact many more of them.

    So what to do about it?

    Do not use a tracking tool, that tries to identify your visitors or collect their personal information. As simple as that.

    Then, you won't have to ask visitors for consent and will be able to track many more visits (although a little bit less accurately).


    However, there is still one problem, that can stop you from tracking a large portion of your visitors - ad blockers.

    This is because ad blockers actually not only block Ads themselves, but also prevent tracking.

    They do it either by blocking scripts from specific sources (like Google Analytics) or by stoping them from sending data to specific domains (like Google's).

    However, there are 3 ways to make it more difficult for them:
    - server-side tracking
    - local hosting
    - ad file proxing

    let's start with the server-side tracking.

    The way it works is simple. Instead of sending traffic information directly to the tracking platform, the information is sent to your server and only then to the server of the tracking tool.

    The downside of this, however, is that your server has some additional work and may require an upgrade.

    Next we have local file hosting.

    In this case, the tracking script is not loaded from the domain of the tracking tool, but directly from your own server. Sometimes they are also renamed to cheat ad blockers. The downside of this solution, is that only few ad blckers can be cheated this way and the tracking file needs to be frequently updated.

    Last but not least, we have file domain proxying. In this case, the tracking file is still kept on the server of the tracking tool, but ad blockers believe that it is in fact hosted on your own server. This technique however has the the smallest impact of these three.

    So, what solutions should you use to track as much visitors as possible?

    Definitely a tool that does not require visitors consent and - if possible - offer server side tracking option.

    And these are all the solutions you can use to maximize the number of visitors that your website tracks. Thank you.
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    4 mins
  • Everything that is wrong with measuring page load speed and how to do it right | Ep. 9

    Everything that is wrong with measuring page load speed and how to do it right | Ep. 9
    Jan 25 2024
    Hello and welcome to another episode of Growth Detectives show. I am your host Chris Planeta and in this episode we are going to talk about everything that is wrong with measuring page speed. Before we do that, however, let's think about one very important thing. How much does it really matter? How much does page speed, page load speed actually matter? Now, when you look this phrase up in Google, you might get different results saying that, for example, one second delay in page speed may result in 10-20 percent bigger bounce rate. However, none of these websites mention one super important thing - motivation. Motivation of people that come to the website, who want to get some content, who want to buy a product, who want to do something on that website. And now, depending on how motivated they are, one second delay in page load speed may not have such great impact. The second thing that matters is the perception of speed. Because there are techniques to make your website seem much faster than it actually is and so people will have much better experience because of that. Now, let's think about the incorrect ways of measuring page speed. So the first one, is looking at one-time snapshots of your website page speed. Most of online tools that measure page speed give you such one-time snapshots. So, you are only getting the page load speed for one specific page at a particular time, from one particular device, with one particular screen resolution. Which is a problem. Why? Because you are not seeing the page speed results of all the other cases, of people in different countries using different devices, having different connection speeds to the Internet. I'm not saying, however, that it's totally useless. It is useful, but not to measure page load speed. What is it useful for? I will tell you about it later, but now let's concentrate on another incorrect way to measure page speed and this is measuring the speed from your own browser. This is, for example, the way Google Lighthouse does it. It measures how fast the page loads on your browser. So in this case, you are getting all the disadvantages of the snapshots I told you earlier, plus an additional disadvantage that your results are skewed by the speed of your internet connection - which of course may vary depending on the time of the day, depending on other users that may use the same connection. So, what is the right way of measuring page speed? First, you need to have a lot of data and not only from one page, but all the pages on your website. The best way to do it, is to use your web analytics tool that measures your traffic and page load speed. Unfortunately, the most popular tool - Google Analytics - has no page load speed measuring feature in the latest version. Now, you need to create your own custom script, that measures all the page speed data and then send it to Google Analytics. However, if you don't want to do it, if you prefer to have something that works out of the box, then I would suggest you take a look at Matomo. Matomo is an open source alternative to Google Analytics and it gives you all the page performance numbers. So Matomo is the way to go here. And now how to look at those numbers. Well, first you need to have at least a few hundred visits. The more, the better. Then, when you get the data, you should segment the traffic and see how much it takes for mobile phones to load your website, how much it takes for other devices to load your website. You might even want to check how long it takes to load a site from different countries. Because if you have your website hosted on a single server in one country, then it may take significantly longer for the website to load if somebody comes from a totally different continent. In such situations, you might want to to have a CDN set up to have your website available on different servers situated in different places in the world. Now, when you have the data and you see that there is something wrong with the page speed, if you see that there are some anomalies like pages that load significantly longer than other ones, then you should take a look if there are people whose page load speed took much longer than other users. If you still see that the numbers are greater than the average then you should take a look at the web page itself. Here is actually the only case when you should be looking at online page speed tools, because they will actually give you information what are the elements on your website that impact your page speed the most. However, it also comes with a catch - because these tools are still not perfect. And from my own experience, I noticed that if your website has a lot of content that is loaded dynamically, like some images in a slider, for example, or products, then the measured speed of page load can be greater than it actually is. So if you want to see the real numbers, you should either remove dynamically generated elements or change their settings so that...
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    8 mins
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