Analytics

**Last updated 18 September 2020: Due to how most browsers now have third-party cookie protections in place, this solution will be very ineffective going forwards. You should instead take a look at a cookieless solution. Some years ago, I wrote a post on how to track cross-domain iframes when using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. That solution relied on hitCallback to decorate the iframe, and now that I look back on it, it has its shortcomings. Read More…

In Google Analytics, the concept of a session is the key aggregation unit of all the data you work with. It’s so central to all the key metrics you use (Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate, Session Duration, Landing Page), and yet there’s an underlying complexity that I’m pretty certain is unrecognized by many of GA’s users. And yet, since this idea of a session is so focal to GA (to the point of being overbearing), it’s annoying that the browser isn’t privy to any of the sessionization parameters that Google Analytics applies to the hits sent from the browser to its servers. Read More…

Here we are, reunited with customTask. This time, we’ll put this wonderful mechanism to work for a very, very good cause. One of the lesser known “features” of Google Analytics is that when the payload size (the request body that is actually sent to Google Analytics with each request) goes past a certain limit, specifically 8192 bytes, the hit is aborted without warning. This can come as a surprise, because there’s no indication anywhere in Google Analytics that you are missing hits because of this. Read More…

After writing yet another customTask article on how to respect client-side opt-out using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, the analytics.js core library was enhanced with a new field that makes it all a lot easier to do. The field, allowAdFeatures, lets you either allow or block the request to DoubleClick that is initiated when Advertising Features have been enabled. In this very short article, I’ll quickly show you what the field does and why it’s useful. Read More…

One of my favorite (and most popular) articles in my blog is Improve Data Collection With Four Custom Dimensions. In that article, I show how you can improve the quality and granularity of your Google Analytics data set with just four Custom Dimensions. The reason I chose the four dimensions (Hit Timestamp, Session ID, Client ID, and User ID) is because I firmly believe that they should be in Google Analytics’ standard set of dimensions, but for some inexplicable reason they aren’t. Read More…

Last updated 22 May 2019: Added expiration of currently open tabs. In this article, Jethro Nederhof of Snowflake Analytics fame and I will introduce you to some pretty neat web browser APIs. The purpose of these APIs is to find out more about how the user navigated to the current page, and what’s going on with their browser tabs. There are so many things you can do with this new information. Read More…

Maybe you knew this, maybe you didn’t, but requests sent from your website (or app) to Google Analytics have a maximum size. Or, more specifically, the payload size (meaning the actual content body of the request) has a maximum. This maximum size of the payload is 8192 bytes. This means, basically, that the entire parameter string sent to Google Analytics servers can be no longer than 8192 characters in length. The thing is, if the payload exceeds this, Google Analytics simply drops the hit. Read More…

Agile analytics isn’t a novel concept in any shape or form. Things like feedback loops and process-oriented development seem to integrate flawlessly into the analytics paradigm, at least on paper. Heck, there’s even the Build-Measure-Learn framework for continuous development. It would be difficult to argue that analytics doesn’t have a role in something with measure in the name! However, past three years of working at Reaktor, one of the world’s top agile technology houses, have introduced me to a whole new set of problems with integrating an “analytics mindset” into an agile workflow, or an “agile mindset” into the analytics process. Read More…

Last updated 7 December 2021: Added a new chapter to highlight the fact that Zone containers have no access to prior state on the page before they were loaded. Google Tag Manager supports loading multiple containers on the same page. It’s useful if you have multiple companies or organizations working on the same site, but for one reason or another (e.g. governance) you want to restrict access to your main container. Read More…

Last updated 9 March 2018 with some new tips. The Scroll Depth trigger in Google Tag Manager has a lot going for it. Tracking how far users scroll down a given page has long since been recognized as an important cog in the engagement tracking machine, and there have been really great solutions for implementing scroll depth tracking for web analytics over the years. With Google Tag Manager’s native Scroll Depth trigger, it’s tempting to think we now have a be-all end-all solution that covers all the bases. Read More…