There are thousands upon thousands of bots, crawlers, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies out there doing nothing but crawling through websites and harvesting the content within for whatever purposes they have been fine-tuned to. While Google Analytics provides a bot filtering feature to filter out “spam” and “bot traffic” from views, this is far from comprehensive enough to tackle all instances of bot traffic that might enter the site. You might have noticed bot traffic in your data even if you have bot filtering toggled on.

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I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing short (and sometimes a bit longer) bite-sized tips for my #GTMTips topic. With the advent of Google Analytics: App + Web and particularly the opportunity to access raw data through BigQuery, I thought it was a good time to get started on a new tip topic: #BigQueryTips. For Universal Analytics, getting access to the BigQuery export with Google Analytics 360 has been one of the major selling points for the expensive platform.

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Since the introduction of custom templates in May 2019, the community (myself included) has been anxiously waiting for some official solution for curating and distributing templates created by the community. Now, finally, we have it. It’s called the Community Template Gallery! Read Google’s announcement in this blog post. I’m not going to go over the basics in this article, since Google’s own documentation stands fine on its own feet.

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Sometimes, in Google Tag Manager’s Debug mode, you’ll see tags appear with the status Still Running, and you’ll (eventually) notice that these tags are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. When you see this message on a tag, it technically means this: The tag failed to signal Google Tag Manager that it is “done”. The technical explanation is, naturally, too simple to be useful. In this article, I’ll explore what “done” means, and how especially Google Analytics tags manifest this behavior.

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I’ve enjoyed working with custom templates for Google Tag Manager. A lot. So much so that whenever the need to add some custom code to a container emerges, my first thought is how to turn that into a custom template. Google has been forthcoming in introducing new APIs steadily, and I think the variety of things you can do with template is improving with every new API release. In this article, I’ll show you how to use a simple tag template for distributing your users to groups, based on a random split.

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Update 7 October 2020: BigQuery Export can now be configured via the property settings of Google Analytics: App + Web, so you don’t need to follow the steps in this article. Check out Charles Farina’s guide for how to do this. Here’s yet another article inspired by the fairly recent release of Google Analytics: App + Web properties. This new property type surfaces Firebase’s analytics capabilities for websites as well, when before they were restricted to mobile apps only (see my guides for iOS and Android).

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A while ago, I published an article on how to build an Android application, and bundle it with Firebase. The purpose of that article, and the one you are reading now, is to slowly introduce the world of mobile app development and Firebase, given the latter is getting more and more traction as Google’s go-to analytics platform. After finishing work on the Android guide, I immediately started working on its counterpart for iOS, and that’s the one you’re reading now.

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