Simo Ahava's blog

It’s been a crazy week. Just crazy. Not only did Google Tag Manager introduce Workspaces, arguably one of its most important releases ever for GTM, but they also revamped the user interface! So very big changes have been underfoot, and I’m so happy to be writing about them, because in my completely biased opinion these changes are amazing and well worth the long wait.

In this article, I want to quickly walk you through what I think are the most meaningful changes in the interface. A lot has changed, but the underlying mechanisms of GTM are still the same. You’re still creating Tags, Triggers, and Variables, and you’re still debugging the container using Debug Mode. However, the new user interfaces enhances and streamlines the various creation processes in the container, and the new Abandon / View Changes feature allows you to debug and diff the changes you or your team has made.

It’s been a crazy week. Just crazy. Not only did Google Tag Manager introduce Workspaces, arguably one of its most important releases ever for GTM, but they also revamped the user interface! So very big changes have been underfoot, and I’m so happy to be writing about them, because in my completely biased opinion these changes are amazing and well worth the long wait.

In this article, I want to quickly walk you through what I think are the most meaningful changes in the interface. A lot has changed, but the underlying mechanisms of GTM are still the same. You’re still creating Tags, Triggers, and Variables, and you’re still debugging the container using Debug Mode. However, the new user interfaces enhances and streamlines the various creation processes in the container, and the new Abandon / View Changes feature allows you to debug and diff the changes you or your team has made.

Well, well, well. Welcome to the Enterprise Game, Google Tag Manager! You know, if you took a look at all the feature requests and complaints that pass through the Google+ community or the Product Forums, you’d notice that a large portion of them revolve around lack of multi-user and multi-team support in the tool. Well GTM has taken a gigantic leap forward to soothe these concerns, with the release of its latest feature: WORKSPACES.

Cross-domain tracking, in Google Analytics, is the process of passing information stored in browser cookies from one domain to another. Due to web browsers’ same-origin policy, a browser cookie is only available to the domain it is written on and all its subdomains (by default). Since Google Analytics uses cookies to persist the Client ID, once the user moves from domain to domain it’s important to somehow pass this Client ID, too.

Cross-domain tracking isn’t the easiest thing to implement, though. At its easiest, especially if you use Google Tag Manager, it’s a question of configuring a couple of fields in your Google Analytics trackers and snippets. However, issues typically arise when your website uses unconventional link redirects, or when you want to persist the Client ID in an iframe loaded from another domain.

Last updated 2 March 2018.

Every now and then you might be urged to run Google Tag Manager and/or Google Analytics locally, meaning without the benefit of a web server serving your files. In other words, you’re loading an HTML file from your computer in the web browser. You can identify a locally run file by the file:/// protocol in the address bar.

Now, deploying Google Tag Manager onto that file with the hopes of running Google Analytics requests locally isn’t quite simple. Well, actually, the deployment is fairly simple, but customizing it so that it actually sends useful hits requires some tweaking.

There are times when I’m disappointed with Google’s developer documentation, especially for Google Tag Manager. Most of the time they get it right, and I’d say around 80% of questions being thrown around the forums can be answered just by reading through the documentation. But there are some cases where the documentation is misleading or even downright dangerous. One of these cases is Enhanced Ecommerce.

This isn’t going to be a thorough critique of said documentation, but the tip in this post has to do with one of the examples that the documentation gives for measuring Product Clicks. In the comment it says:

Enhanced Ecommerce is a very useful set of reports in Google Analytics. They extend the standard Ecommerce funnel, which measures only purchases, and allow you to observe products from the very first impression, through various interactions, all the way to the purchase and even beyond, if the user wanted a refund. Google has some solid documentation on how to implement and interpret Enhanced Ecommerce, but if there’s one area that would deserve more illumination, it’s attribution.

Have you created a Chrome Extension, and now you’re dying to find out how users are interacting with it? Perhaps you want to see what features are (not) being utilized, or perhaps you’re just interested in knowing if people are actually using it.

In this article, I’ll show you how to configure Google Tag Manager, so that it works in the restricted sandbox of the Chrome Extension. You’ll need to make some tweaks, but it’s still perfectly doable.

I have very little against Google Analytics’ default dashboards. The reason I shy away from them is because they lack the type of customization I’ve come to expect from a dashboarding tool. On top of that, they only let you look at GA data, and I learned early on in my career that focusing on just one vertical is one of the cardinal sins you can make as an analyst.

Furthermore, over the years I’ve become more and more disenchanted with GA’s clunky user interface, and the less time I spend in it the better for my serotonin levels. In fact, GA’s excellent Core Reporting API combined with a platform like Tableau or Klipfolio to manage and manipulate the data stream has become invaluable in my everyday work.

Google Tag Manager is a great tool. Yeah, you came all the way to this article to read that truism. It also performs really well, loading at a sweet, swift pace even on a slow connection, thanks to pretty decent response times from Google servers. On top of that, the library itself loads asynchronously, meaning the container download doesn’t interrupt the browser as it tries to make sense of your messy HTML.

First of all, I’m sorry about the title. I should really stop throwing the word “simple” around, since people always tell me that the stuff I claim to be easy and straightforward is rarely so. But since this is my blog, I reserve the right to use whatever stupid and misleading terminology I want. I maintain that what follows IS quite simple, especially when considering the amount of complexity it reduces in your Universal Analytics setup.