Hello friends! Today I want to direct your attention to a dangerous setting found within the bowels of the Universal Analytics Tag template in Google Tag Manager. In fact, GTM itself highly discourages you from meddling with it: I actually agree with this warning. It should be highly discouraged, as modifying the tracker name introduces a potential hazard to your tracking plan, unless you know what you’re doing. Read More…
Google Tag Manager’s Data Layer is something I’ve touched upon in pretty much all of my articles. It’s such an integral part of what makes a tag management solution great and applicable to a host of business scenarios. I’ve also talked at length about the internal data model of Google Tag Manager, and this #GTMTips post is very much related to this rather murky concept. In this post, we’ll go over the Data Layer Variable Version selection, and I’ll try to explain just what this selector does. Read More…
Welcome back my friends (to the show that never ends)! It’s been a couple of weeks since my last barrage of articles, and I think the time is ripe to do some testing! First things first, here’s a picture of me shovelling snow: And now back to the topic at hand. One of the things that seems to be a hot topic in Universal Analytics is cross-domain tracking. I’ve never really tackled the beast head-on, since there’s such a wealth of excellent articles about it out there. Read More…
Tracking YouTube videos in Google Tag Manager is one of the more useful things you can do in terms of tracking. YouTube has a wonderful API that you can tap into and convert the detected events into dataLayer messages. There are some really good solutions out there for tracking YouTube videos in GTM: The wonderful solution by Cardinal Path. An even more thorough treatment by Bounteous. Read More…
In Google Analytics for iOS, there are two types of campaign measurement. There’s install campaign measurement, which lets you track the channels which brought your visitors to the App Store, where they proceeded to download your app. There’s also launch campaign tracking, which lets you attribute app launches to specific campaigns. In this tip post, we’ll tackle the latter. We’ll leverage a feature of the Google Analytics iOS SDK to build the parameters, and then push them to dataLayer so that they can be used in the Tag. Read More…
One of the less-known features of Google Tag Manager, a hidden gem if you will, is the URL Source setting in the URL Variable type. It lets you parse any URL String for its components. Tip 38: Parse URL strings with the URL Source setting The setting itself is easy to find. Just edit an existing URL Variable, or create a new one. Then, scroll down to the More Settings divider, expand it, and you’ll see the URL Source drop-down list. Read More…
For some reason, you might run into a situation where you need to add multiple Google Tag Manager containers on the same page. Usually this is because of poor governance or an inflexible organization. My recommendation is to fix things in your projects first, and only resort to multiple containers if you can’t seem to resolve your governance issues using your vocal cords (or your fists). Officially, Google Tag Manager introduced support for adding multiple containers earlier in 2015. Read More…
(UPDATE 28 Sep 2016: The official recommendation has finally caught up with the times. Now the correct placement for the JavaScript methods of the container snippet is, indeed, in <head>.) I want to address something I’ve been confused about from the very first day since I started using Google Tag Manager. Why on earth would an asynchronously loading JavaScript library be recommended to place in the beginning of <body>, when the logical place to start loading dependencies is as early as possible in the document load process? Read More…
There might be many reasons you’d want to fire a single Tag multiple times in Google Tag Manager. The most common one is when you want to deploy multiples of a single tracking point on the web. Perhaps you have a roll-up account you want to send the hits to, in addition to the site-specific tracking property. Quite a while ago, I gave a solution for this with a specific focus on Google Analytics Tags. Read More…
A while ago I wrote a blog post about how to install Google Tag Manager for iOS using the Swift programming language (you can read the article here). I’ve been doing a lot of work with Swift lately, and I’m more and more convinced that GTM is actually a very powerful utility for running in your iOS app instead of the Google Analytics SDK. Why? Because it abstracts a lot of the nitty-gritty you’d otherwise need to explicitly manage in your GA installation. Read More…