Simo Ahava's blog

Wait. What? Why write an article about something that should work by default in Universal Analytics? I mean, here’s a screenshot from the guide I just linked to in the previous sentence: There it is. Clear as day: “Tracking users across subdomains does not require any additional configuration.” Also, some of the recent, excellent guides to cross-domain tracking, written by E-Nor and Bounteous enforce the same: you just need a default Universal Analytics Tag in Google Tag Manager. Read More…

Wait. What? Why write an article about something that should work by default in Universal Analytics? I mean, here’s a screenshot from the guide I just linked to in the previous sentence: There it is. Clear as day: “Tracking users across subdomains does not require any additional configuration.” Also, some of the recent, excellent guides to cross-domain tracking, written by E-Nor and Bounteous enforce the same: you just need a default Universal Analytics Tag in Google Tag Manager. Read More…

Here’s a tip that’s especially important to anyone working with a single-page application. Google Tag Manager persists items in its data model until you either manually delete the variable and/or its value from the data model, or until the user browses away from the page. There’s nothing as annoying as the example in the image below, where a value that was set for an earlier Tag is resent with a new Tag, even though the purpose was to leave it out. Read More…

PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is something we need to actively combat against when using Google Analytics, as the platform explicitly forbids sending PII to Google Analytics properties in any size, form, or shape. One of the most common ways of accidentally passing PII to a property is via query parameters. Many email platforms out there, for example, see no problem in including the user’s email address in the query string, especially when the user follows a link in a newsletter. Read More…

According to their website, SoundCloud is “the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere”. For artists, it’s a channel for distributing previews of their tracks, and for people like me it’s a nice way to do some API tinkering. To each their own, I guess! I saw a number of requests in the Google+ Google Tag Manager community about a SoundCloud integration, so I decided to look into it to see if I could just build one. Read More…

Are you (even marginally) interested in one of the most powerful tag management systems out there? Do you want to refresh your memory on how JavaScript works in the web? Do you want to get the most out of Google Tag Manager as the go-to system for all marketing and measurement tagging on your websites? Take the Google Tag Manager Fundamentals Course at the Analytics Academy, then! And take it even if you have no idea what the tool is. Read More…

This is a very simple tip, but judging by the number of queries on the Product Forums, it should prove helpful. Blogger is a free blogging service by Google. Like WordPress, they allow you to run hosted blogs on the blogger.com domain, and they also allow you to modify the HTML source. This, of course, means that you can add the Google Tag Manager code to the HTML template, if you wish (and why wouldn’t you! Read More…

Google Tag Manager has a learning curve. We’ve all gone through it. The developer guide as well as the new and improved help center are very useful, but they do not answer all the questions a thorough implementation project might face. There are many ways to find answers to your questions, and I thought I’d go through some of my favorite options here. Tip 22: Get GTM Assistance To help you in getting help with GTM, there are two things we’ll need to go over: where to look for help, and how to ask for assistance. Read More…

Data is difficult. Growing a business is difficult. Measuring success is difficult. And you know what? They should be difficult. Otherwise we’d all be equally stupid, whereas now those of us ambitious enough to exert themselves are winning the race. And it’s not just working with data that’s difficult. The whole Web is a mess! Search engine optimization consultants, for example, are trigger-happy in doling out advice about server-side redirects without stopping to consider the implications of what they’re recommending. Read More…

Last weekend, I wrote a very simple web app that automatically creates a number of referral spam filters to tackle the problem that seems to have everybody all riled up. For a nice recap of the situation, take a look at this post by Jeff Sauer, or this article by Mike Sullivan. This isn’t an opinion piece, even though I’ve got a great number of opinions about this issue. Read More…

There are many tools and methods to make Google Analytics more manageable. Google Tag Manager is probably the best known of these, and you can find many, many articles about GTM on these pages as well. However, today I want to tell you about one of the features of Universal Analytics that hasn’t, as far as I know, received too much attention. It’s funny, because at the same time almost everyone uses the feature in the shape of eCommerce, enhanced link attribution, and cross-domain tracking. Read More…