Every now and then I run into a problem which needs some creativity to find a fix. When choosing a course of action, I tend to land first on an extremely complicated solution. However, if I’m patient enough, I manage to whittle it down to something far more manageable and efficient. In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you one of these extremely simple solutions to a problem which you might normally overcomplicate.

Continue reading

In this article, I’m going to tackle one of the most frequently asked questions out there: Can you run Google Analytics using the snippet AND using a Google Tag Manager Tag on the same page? There are many facets to this query, so I’ll try to tackle as many of them as I possibly can. First, a terminology rant. You hear lots of talk about “on-page” and “inline” Google Analytics tracking, as that’s what’s used to describe the non-GTM way of tracking Google Analytics.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading

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.

Continue reading