Simo Ahava's blog

Tag sequencing was introdced to Google Tag Manager in late 2015. Its main purpose was to facilitate the sequential firing of tags that have dependencies with each other. Due to the asynchronous nature of third-party libraries like Google Tag Manager, it’s difficult to establish an order of completion with tags that compete for their chance to fire. Tag sequencing changed this, as it allows you to establish setup and cleanup tags - the former firing before the main tag, and the latter after. Read More…

Tag sequencing was introdced to Google Tag Manager in late 2015. Its main purpose was to facilitate the sequential firing of tags that have dependencies with each other. Due to the asynchronous nature of third-party libraries like Google Tag Manager, it’s difficult to establish an order of completion with tags that compete for their chance to fire. Tag sequencing changed this, as it allows you to establish setup and cleanup tags - the former firing before the main tag, and the latter after. Read More…

One of the great ways to leverage Google Tag Manager in your web analytics tracking is to make use of all the possible custom events that the browser has to offer. One such event is beforeunload. It’s dispatched in the browser when the user is about to unload the page. This means, typically, that the user is about to leave the page after clicking a link, or they are about to exit the browser by either closing the tab or the entire window. Read More…

A Content Security Policy (CSP) is something you’ll configure your web server with to add an additional layer of protection, especially from harmful scripts loaded from third-party vendors. Once you have a CSP in place, all resources loaded and executed by the web page need to pass the CSP directives. For Google Tag Manager, this is very relevant. If you have a CSP in place, you will need to modify it so that Google Tag Manager functions properly. 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…

I’ve spent a considerable amount of time talking and writing about how to improve the granularity of your Google Analytics data, especially when using Google Tag Manager. I’ve also gone on and on and on (and on) about customTask, which makes adding metadata to the Google Analytics hits dispatched from your website a breeze. In this article, I’ll introduce a simple way to add yet another level of detail to your GA hits, using customTask as the method of choice. Read More…

When working with the analytics of single-page applications (SPA), there are a number of things to pay attention to. For example, you need to make sure that Google Analytics doesn’t break your session attribution, and that you are not inadvertently inflating your page speed timing metrics. Actually, there are so many “gotchas” when it comes to SPA tracking in tools like Google Analytics that you just can’t get by with a plug-and-play implementation. 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…

Here’s a quick tip in response to a query in Twitter by Riccardo Mares. By making a small change to the Google Tag Manager container snippet, you can have the <script> element generated by the snippet notify the page as soon as the Google Tag Manager library has downloaded. What you do with this information is up to you. If you are working directly with the google_tag_manager interface, for example, it might make sense to not act until the interface has been established. Read More…