Google Tag Manager

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…

Here’s a very quick tip this time, but one that’s caused a lot of headache for many Google Tag Manager users. Tip 21: Use the All Pages Trigger correctly Let’s face it, All Pages isn’t really an intuitive Trigger name. Many seem to interpret it as: enable the Tag to fire on all pages, but use the other Trigger (e.g. Link Click) to actually fire it. As it turns out, the All Pages Trigger will fire the Tag on all pages. Read More…

If you read my previous post on fetching the Client ID from the Universal Analytics tracker object with Google Tag Manager, you might have agreed with me that it sucks you can’t access the tracker object interface in real time using Google Tag Manager. This is because all of the set commands you add to a Universal Analytics tag template take place before the analytics.js is loaded and the tracker object is properly created. Read More…

Since writing my rant about the schema conspiracy of web analytics platforms, I’ve been giving the whole idea of hit-level data collection a lot of thought. Sessionization is very heavily implemented in Google Analytics, which is understandable, but the regular Google Analytics API just doesn’t give you the kind of information you’d need, if you wanted to stitch hits together differently in your own backend. In fact, there are four distinct levels of aggregation that are not exposed via the API, even though I think they should: Read More…