dannytalk ™ A Danny Ng Blog

I finally got my tax bonus payment from the government last week via direct deposit. Unfortunately, as soon as I got it, I had to use it to pay for the car registration, insurance and service.

Haha, what luck. Didn’t even get to spend it on myself. Oh well, I’m sure that “stimulated” the economy.

Remember guys, as long as you are eligible, your payment should come by the 16th of May either via cheque or direct deposit, depending on how you received your tax return payment last financial year.

If you used a tax agent to lodge your tax return last financial year, you should check with your tax agent whether the payment is with your tax agent. Also make sure your bank details and address are up to date with the ATO.

If you still haven’t received payment by the 16th of May, you should call 1300 686 636 and the ATO may be able to help you if you are eligible.

It’d be interesting to find out how you spent your tax bonus payment.

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If you haven’t read the news, Carrie Prejean – Miss California was set to win the Miss USA crown but became first-runner up because of her response to Perez Hilton’s question regarding gay marriages.

When asked by Perez Hilton on her views on whether other states should legalise gay marriage like Vermont, the fourth state to do so, Carrie stood up for her beliefs and responded that a marriage is between a man and a woman, therefore no, she does not support gay marriage.

I think this severely pissed Perez off (as you can see in the later part of the video) because he’s gay if you didn’t know.

First thing that comes to mind is, why on earth is Perez Hilton a judge at a beauty pageant? He’s a celebrity blogger who indulges himself with gossip and a lot of trash media. Not only does he lack quality judging abilities, he’s even taken that response as a personal insult and insulted her intelligence via his website. Very unprofessional. Has Miss USA become the new Jerry Springer pageant show?

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It’s amazing how time flies. Easter is a very special period for me, not just only that Jesus was crucified and raised again, but it was when Hong Yi and I officially became a pair.

Two years ago on April the 6th, I remember flying down to Melbourne and I was supposed to meet up with her that night for dinner. Unfortunately my auntie (mum’s friend) ran into car problems which meant I was late getting picked up and I was staying with my auntie out in the suburbs. Hong Yi was staying at La Trobe street then.

It was only the next day that I got the chance to finally meeting her after not seeing her for almost 3 months and that very night we made it official. So yeah…two years later.

Our relationship is an interesting one. We started long distance and have been long distance ever since. I do get a lot of questions about how I manage to sustain a long distance relationship. Let me tell you this: distance makes the heart grow fonder. There are pros & cons but I guess we usually don’t take each other for granted when we meet up.

Anyways, not here to talk about the relationship. So here are some photos of what we did!

Fish Markets

Hong Yi has been been quite upset at me for not taking her to the fish markets despite her visiting Sydney several times already. If you don’t already know, she’s a fan of food. So is her mum, a food-blogger!

So after many verbal beatings from her, we finally made our trip to the fish markets!

Fish markets is famous for seafood, for obvious reasons. You can get really fresh fishes, oysters, lobsters and much more at affordable price. Hong Yi said her family would’ve loved the fish markets!

I would recommend getting there first thing in the morning as the stuff is the freshest then. Parking is not cheap over there so I wouldn’t recommend staying for more than 2 hours.

One of the must foods you must try over there is the fresh raw salmon, tuna, swordfish and oysters. The oysters are brought in fresh from the morning’s catch and you can see people cutting open the shell and washing it. When we squeezed lemon juice onto it, it even squirmed around a little! I think Hong Yi was grossed out by it so she let me eat most of the oysters hehe. We also had half a lobster with chips and salad.

If you’re having your meal outside, be very wary of the seagulls. I remember I was having my salmon and tuna outside last time and there were 2 big pieces of tuna. When I was looking away, a seagull dived down and snatched one of the tuna pieces which got me really angry at the bird as there were only 2 pieces and I love raw tuna!

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First of all, let me explain why in Google Analytics you need to do some configurations to track sub-domains / cross-domains.

Google Analytics does not do this by default, thus whenever you’re on sub1.domain.com and you go to sub2.domain.com, Google Analytics will record this as a referral rather than maintaining the same session and the same campaign information. If you’re running e-commerce tracking and you use sub-domains during the e-commerce process, this will totally screw up your reports as it will attribute all transactions to referrals (from your own site) and you will have no idea how your other online marketing campaigns (i.e. direct, organic, cpc) are performing.

Sub-Domain Tracking

This one is fairly easy. The method you need to use is _setDomainName().

The _setDomainName() method sets the Google cookies to the domain name string parameter that it is given, otherwise it automatically resolves the domain name from the location object in the DOM if no parameter is given. This means that on sub-domains, the cookies will be set to separate sub-domains.

So to configure Google Analytics to set the cookies to the same domain name, simply use the domain name as the string parameter for the _setDomainName() method.

E.g. If I have a website called sub1.dannytalk.com and sub2.dannytalk.com, I would use _setDomainName(‘dannytalk.com’) throughout all my pages (sub-domains and main domain).

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x"); // replace this with your own account number
pageTracker._setDomainName("dannytalk.com");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

The Google API officially states to use the period at the start of the domain name. I have tried with and without and it seems to work fine but I prefer without period (looks nicer).

Once you’ve done this, Google Analytics should record all visits to these sub-domains as the same visit, maintaining the same campaign information. However, in your reports,you won’t be able to tell which request URI came from which sub-domain as the domain name is stripped out from the reports.

In addition, if you have two sub-domains that have the same page name (i.e. index.html), then Google Analytics will combine these two into one which will artificially inflate your page statistics.

A simple way around this is to implement what I call a sub-domain visibility filter which will prefix your request URI’s with the domain name. This will help you differentiate the pages as well as avoid inflating the page statistics.

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I just passed my Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test today and scored 94%! Not bad eh? The passing score is 75%. So thought I’d post some tips here while the exam questions are still fresh in my mind.

You have 2 hours to complete the exam (more than enough) and there’s 70 questions that consist of multiple choice, true/false and select all that applies type questions. Basically the trickiest one I found was the select all that applies type questions.

Materials To Go Through – Conversion University

Before you start the GAIQ exam, make sure you go through the materials at Google’s conversion university – especially the ones that you don’t know much about. I didn’t go through all of them, just the ones I thought would be handy to refresh myself with.

The ones that I think will be handy are:

• Profiles in Google Analytics
• Filters in Google Analytics
• Cookies and Google Analytics
• E-Commerce Tracking
• Domains and Sub-Domains

Knowledge To Learn

In my opinion, these are some of the things you should’ve had some experience implementing before doing the test. If you haven’t, go play around with it!

• E-Commerce Tracking (addTrans, addItem methods)
• Cross Domain / Sub-Domain Tracking (link, linkByPost, setDomainName, setAllowLinker, setAllowHash methods)
• Goal Setup (note: Multiple same goal conversions within a session are unique)
• Profile Setup (note: What are the benefits of creating more than 1 profile? What can/can’t you do with profiles?)
• Filter Setup (predefined, include/exclude, search & replace and custom – advanced)
• Integration with Google Adwords (cost data import, auto-tagging)
• Google Analytics interface (reports, user/filter management)
• Regular Expression (note: You don’t have to be a pro, but it definitely helps)
• Cookies (note: Google uses first-party cookies and you cannot identify an individual through it)

Handy Links

Here are some handy links that you should have open during the test: Read the rest of this entry »

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