Simo Ahava's blog

Updated 1 October 2019 With ITP 2.3 it looks like Safari is reducing the usefulness of localStorage as well, so using that as an alternative fix to persistence issues should not be considered future-proof. this solution should not be considered future-proof. Updated 12 March 2019 with some minor clarifications.. On 21st February 2019, WebKit announced the release of the latest iteration of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), known as ITP 2. Read More…

Updated 1 October 2019 With ITP 2.3 it looks like Safari is reducing the usefulness of localStorage as well, so using that as an alternative fix to persistence issues should not be considered future-proof. this solution should not be considered future-proof. Updated 12 March 2019 with some minor clarifications.. On 21st February 2019, WebKit announced the release of the latest iteration of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), known as ITP 2. Read More…

Updated 1 October 2019 With ITP 2.3 it looks like Safari is reducing the usefulness of localStorage as well, so this solution should not be considered future-proof. The only stable way to persist client-side data at the moment seems to be HTTP cookies. Updated 7 March 2019 - Added some extra caveats to this solution. Also, be sure to read my article on ITP 2.1, which has far more detail on what Intelligent Tracking Prevention is and how to work with it. Read More…

The jQuery JavaScript library is by almost any means of counting the most popular JavaScript library used in websites around the world. It’s so influential, in fact, that its evolution is tightly bound to the JavaScript standardization effort itself, and it’s an integral part of the JS Foundation’s efforts to build a community for JavaScript developers. Google Tag Manager, similarly, is the most popular tag management system used in websites, globally. Read More…

A recurring question in the Google Tag Manager communities (e.g. product forums) is how to use an Enhanced Ecommerce dataLayer object with the Facebook pixel code? It’s a common question since running a Facebook conversion pixel on a site that also collects data from the store into Google Analytics’ Enhanced Ecommerce reports is probably a very typical scenario. Side note: Since Google+ is about to go the way of the dodo, I’ve created an archive of the entire community which you can browse and make text searches against. Read More…

Last updated 9 October 2020: customTask updated to a more stable version. I’m a big fan of Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics. In fact, I think it’s the only valid way to deploy Ecommerce tracking today, especially when using Google Tag Manager. The ability to use a Custom JavaScript variable and the possibility to tackle the full ecommerce funnel are some of the benefits of using Enhanced Ecommerce. Read More…

Last updated 9 October 2020: customTask updated to a more stable version. The Custom HTML tag in Google Tag Manager is splendid. It’s your go-to tool when you need to run arbitrary JavaScript on the webpage. Some might even use it to actually add HTML elements to the page, but I’m willing to bet running JavaScript is its most common use. However, there’s a downside to Custom HTML tags, which is only made more apparent on single-page apps which do not clear the full page when transitioning from one state to another. Read More…

Thanks to the intrepid detective work of Jørn Reidel and Ahmed Marof, it looks like one of the big hurdles for doing a full migration from using the legacy Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager SDKs to the latest Tag Manager + Firebase SDK is now a non-issue. The issue is, of course, Product-scoped Custom Dimensions or more specifically the lack of support thereof. Until now, I’d been holding against recommending the migration to anyone with Enhanced Ecommerce tracking set up simply because the documentation didn’t mention the possibility of sending these custom definitions to Google Analytics. Read More…

Perhaps you didn’t know this, but there’s a really handy demo account for Google Analytics you can use to check out how Google Analytics works in a real business context (the data is from the Google Merchandise Store). However, you can access the account with nothing more than read-only access. This is annoying if you wanted to customize the setup. Worry not, I have a solution for you! Harnessing the awesome power of customTask, you can create a duplicate of the data collected on any website where you can modify the tracking (e. Read More…

One of the big problems in Google Analytics’ data model is the immutability of historical data. Once a row of data is written into the data table, it is there practically for good. This is especially annoying in two cases: spam and bogus ecommerce hits. The first is a recognized issue with an open and public data collection protocol, the latter is an annoyance that can explode into full-blown sabotage (you can use the Measurement Protocol to send hundreds of huge transactions to your competitor’s GA property, for example). Read More…

In my intense love affair with the Google Cloud Platform, I’ve never felt more inspired to write content and try things out. After starting with a Snowplow Analytics setup guide, and continuing with a Lighthouse audit automation tutorial, I’m going to show you yet another cool thing you can do with GCP. In this guide, I’ll show you how to use an open-source web crawler running in a Google Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instance to scrape all the internal and external links of a given domain, and write the results into a BigQuery table. Read More…