This nifty little solution will let you calculate the time spent on pages that are not tracked in Google Analytics by default. These include both bounced landing pages and exit pages. Bounced pages and exit pages lack the necessary subsequent pageview, which Google Analytics uses to calculate time-based metrics. Before you go on, read this excellent article by Yehoshua Coren: REAL Time On Page in Google Analytics Yehoshua gives a very nice use case for the technical solution I’m about to explore.

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Due to a recent change in the UI (see entry for February 12, 2015 in the release notes), the large and ever-expanding group of fields you could set for your Universal Analytics tags has been mostly removed. Instead, the often obscure Fields to Set selection has been promoted to the top of More Settings, and you control most of the Universal Analytics fields through this selector. In this #GTMtips, we’ll take a quick look at what’s changed, how it’s changed, and how to work with this new, slimmed-down tag template.

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Quick history. On May 23, 2014, the following announcement was made on the Google Webmaster Central Blog: In order to solve this problem, we decided to try to understand pages by executing JavaScript. It's hard to do that at the scale of the current web, but we decided that it's worth it. We have been gradually improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user's browser with JavaScript turned on.

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One of the big mysteries in browser-based data collection platforms like Google Analytics is what happens when the visitor is not being tracked. This is most obvious in cases where the user explicitly opts out of tracking, when the user does not have JavaScript active in their browser, in bounced sessions, and on exit pages. Opt-outing means that the user explicitly prohibits a website from tracking them. In some cases, it’s possible that opt-out is the default, and the user must explicitly opt-in to allow GA to record their visits.

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In this #GTMtips post, we’ll go over a simple method for tracking file downloads in Google Tag Manager, specifically the new, V2 interface. Also, “tracking file downloads” means sending Events to Google Analytics, so this is a GA for GTM guide as well. Tip 15: Set up file download tracking in GTM Since we’re using Google Analytics as the tracking platform, we’ll need the following ingredients to make this setup work:

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NOTE 30 Oct 2019: I’ve published a new article on outbound link tracking in Google Tag Manager, which makes the whole process much, MUCH simpler. I strongly recommend you read that article instead. Tracking outbound links is important for many. Identifying the exit paths is almost as important as tracking entrances. In this simple #GTMtips post, I’ll show you how to track outbound links with a simple Trigger + Auto-Event Variable combination in the new Google Tag Manager interface.

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(UPDATE 3 Apr 2017: There is a newer version of GTM Tools out, so please ignore this article and read this one instead.) So, the time has come to update my GTM Tools. I released the first toolset in October 2014, and it performed its duties just well enough. Sure, the UI was ugly as hell, and there were bugs along the way, but for cloning containers, macros, and rules, and for visualizing containers, it was just good enough.

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