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.

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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.

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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.

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I’m currently at SMX München, which is still one of my favorite conferences in Europe. The quality of the talks is superb, and the organization is just perfect. So today, after my talk (joint session with the awesome Dave Sottimano), I was listening to the inimitable Mike King give an excellent presentation together with Ari Nahmani on technical skill prerequisites for all digital marketers today. Needless to say, I strongly agree with their view that digital marketing has always been a technical discipline, and the web is getting more and more complex each day that passes.

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A couple of days ago, I wrote an article on tracking content engagement. Even though the solution itself works, and it’s a really neat trick if I can say so myself, it has its problems. After all the glory I showered on User Timings in Google Analytics, they have one serious flaw: they cap at 10,000 samples per day. What a ridiculous, arbitrary limit. In any case, this means that if you have enough traffic to accumulate 10K user timing hits per day, it means that the solution I provided in the previous article will not work for you, as the Pageviews will not be capped, meaning the calculation of Total Engaged Time / Pageviews will be skewed.

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When looking at Google Analytics reports, you’d think you get a pretty good idea of how people are interacting with your site, right? I mean, you’re tracking events here, pageviews there, and user timings, custom dimensions, custom metrics, and calculated metrics are all part of your daily lingo. But you’re also probably aware of how futile this tracking is. After all, all you’re seeing are numbers that reflect certain outcomes the visitors have produced on the website, and how these outcomes match against your preconceived goals and objectives, right?

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This is a really cool feature for Google Analytics data collection, of which I’ve heard very, very little buzz. It’s a way to debug any and all hits sent to the Google Analytics endpoint at https://www.google-analytics.com/collect. In all simplicity, you just need to copy the entire URL of the HTTP request to your clipboard, paste it into a web browser, and add /debug between the hostname and /collect.

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