On some days, you learn about a Regular Expression

Right. So when your identity as a startup can be defined vaguely by no more than a landing page on a free website creator, you can count the daily non-self visitors to your site by the number of thumbs on one of your hands (if you’re lucky).

(I put that Rubik’s cube in there on purpose to, you know, give some character to the pic. #fail?)

On some days, you notice that even the number of fingers and toes, combined, are not enough to count the hits on your site. And on some other days, you would have visitors from a city whose concentration of your target audience would be a proper fraction.

You are convinced that something’s not right because even if you google your domain name along with all the relevant keywords, your website is not to be found anywhere on the first 17 pages of google search results (after which you usually give up clicking the next button).

(EDIT: I think our page rank on google has improved now)

In both the above cases, a tiny part of you is happy that the couple of hours you put in to add stock images and templat-ed buttons to your site are getting noticed by some random dude out there.

You go further down the rabbit hole with Google Analytics (GA) and find out the corresponding referral sites. You then search for that very referral site on Google, open it, and try to hunt a mention of your site on there.

You even have a coffee-time chat with your non-techy co-founder (if you have one) about this unusual behaviour and then switch back to the usual startup jazz soon after you realise that they have as little clue as you do.

Then, after a little more unfocussed research, you find out that this was spam. Nothing more than an algorithm messing with your data.

And then you read up an internet article, written by a fellow analytics-savvy dude, to set up filters on GA. As useful as it is, GA is non-intuitive and comes across as a tool designed for techies or people who read documentation or watch tutorials.

Fast-forward a few moments of mild excitement about achieving something not even remotely hardcore with GA, you come across an expression with domain names interspersed with special characters such as ‘\’ or ‘|’. That, my dear fellas, is an example of a Regular Expression. GA can include or exclude a list of such spammy domains if you provide it with a list in the form of a Regular Expression.

After following a laundry-list of steps, I felt good about cleaning up my data. I read further that the filter may take up to 24 hours to be effective. It was 1 am on a Friday night (or Sat morning if you like), and so I, a millennial, was not happy to not be instantly gratified. But by next morning, the data was clean! I made myself useful, finally.

That’s it. I’ll continue chronicling stories from my startup-centric life if I find them mildly interesting or share-worthy.

-ShareClub Co-founder