Simo Ahava's blog

5 years ago, on 1st October 2012, this lovely video popped up in Google’s Analytics Blog: It was accompanied by a blog post, which contained a brief look into many of Google Tag Manager’s key features, some of which are still relevant today. At this time, those of us who started using the tool immediately, or who had been beta-testing it, saw quickly what the key selling point of GTM was. Read More…

5 years ago, on 1st October 2012, this lovely video popped up in Google’s Analytics Blog: It was accompanied by a blog post, which contained a brief look into many of Google Tag Manager’s key features, some of which are still relevant today. At this time, those of us who started using the tool immediately, or who had been beta-testing it, saw quickly what the key selling point of GTM was. Read More…

Universal Analytics can collect Page Timing data from users that load your pages. This data is populated in to the Behavior -> Site Speed -> Page Timings report, and it’s a very useful feature for optimizing your website. However, there’s a murky underside to this generous feature. The way Page Timings collection works is that when Pageview hits are sent from the site, a sample of these (1% by default) are automatically followed by a timing hit which includes page performance data grabbed from the Navigation Timing API. Read More…

Ever since the Lookup Table variable was introduced in Google Tag Manager, users have been craving for more. The Lookup Table does exactly what it promises: lookups. These are exact match operations, which are extremely inexpensive to perform, because they can only have a binary result: either the match exists in the data store being queried or it doesn’t. This performance stays constant even if the data store being queried increases in size. Read More…

There’s a fabled, mythical beast that prowls the jungles of digital marketing. They have no issues with running and analyzing crawler data, offering suggestions for server-side redirects, building remarketing audiences, implementing tag management solutions, speaking of Data Layers, copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow, configuring bid managers, and speaking at conferences presenting on all the aforementioned activities. However, for some reason, they still claim that they are “non-technical”, or “just marketers”. Read More…

Last updated 20 April 2020: Clarified how lazy-loaded videos can be tracked with this trigger. Let’s cut straight to the chase. Google Tag Manager has just released the YouTube Video trigger, which gives you native support for YouTube video tracking. And it’s great! Even though we’ve been more than satisfied with the excellent tracking scripts provided by e.g. Cardinal Path and Bounteous (with a small modification from yours truly), this is a no-brainer for native support in Google Tag Manager. Read More…

Sending personally identifiable information (PII) to Google Analytics is one of the things you should really avoid doing. For one, it’s against the terms of service of the platform, but also you will most likely be in violation of national, federal, or EU legislation drafted to protect the privacy of individuals online. In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you a way to make sure that any tags you configure this solution with will not contain strings that might be construed as PII. Read More…

The steady increase in mobile use over the last years has introduced some new challenges for web analytics. It’s not just about mismatches in the tracking model (the concept of sessions is even more absurd for apps than it is for desktop browsing), but about something more fundamental, more basic. Think about it: if a visitor visits the website using a mobile device, there’s a significant chance of them losing internet connectivity and going unintentionally offline. Read More…

If you open the Google Tag Manager user interface and browser your tags, triggers, and variables, you might notice that the UI now has two new features: Pagination, where only 50 results are shown per page A quick search / filter bar at the top of each list, which lets you narrow the list down to results that match your query Pagination might be a nuisance in large containers, but it was implemented to improve performance. Read More…

More often than not, much of what we do in web analytics can be automated. This applies especially to implementations, audits, configurations, and reporting. So when I’m faced with a menial, manual task that might take hours for me to complete if done by hand, I always look at what could be done with some scripting and API work. I want to introduce a couple of Google Sheets add-ons I’ve written and released to the public. Read More…

Tracking what a user selects in a drop-down (or select) list/menu can be very useful. This is particularly the case when the selection immediately does something, such as initiate a download or navigate the user to another page. But even if there is no immediate action, it’s still interesting to know what selections users might be doing, if only to uncover yet another piece of the engagement puzzle. Here’s the Google Tag Manager way to do it! Read More…