Simo Ahava's blog

Analyzing what people write in your site search field is pretty much one of the smartest things you can do for your website tracking. If certain terms pop up over and over again in internal search reports, it means that your site is not providing the answers people are looking for, meaning you have an excellent opportunity to provide supply for the demand! However, not all site search applications are trackable out-of-the-box. Read More…

Analyzing what people write in your site search field is pretty much one of the smartest things you can do for your website tracking. If certain terms pop up over and over again in internal search reports, it means that your site is not providing the answers people are looking for, meaning you have an excellent opportunity to provide supply for the demand! However, not all site search applications are trackable out-of-the-box. Read More…

Here’s the link to part 2 of this JavaScript guide. The thing about Google Tag Manager, or any JavaScript tag manager for that matter, is that there’s JavaScript involved. In fact, the tool itself is just a JavaScript library with some additional bells and whistles (such as a management UI). This means that to make the best of it, some knowledge of JavaScript is warranted, and that’s the point of this post. Read More…

Apologies for leaving you hanging. It’s now almost three weeks since I published the first part of this post, and I’m sure you’ve been holding your breath ever since. There’s been a lot going on since the last post. First, my favorite sports team in the world, San Antonio Spurs, won their fifth NBA championship from the defending champs, Miami Heat. Next, my wife and I moved to our new house, and we’ve been remodeling ever since. Read More…

It’s time to dig into my tip library for some pretty cool things you can do with Google Tag Manager to enhance your site tagging. Some of these are macro magic through and through, some of these are best practices, and some of these are things that will make your life easier while managing a tag management solution. I’ve split this post into two parts to make it more Hobbit and less Lord Of the Rings length-wise. Read More…

That’s right, I changed the name! Huge thanks to Paul Gailey for the inspiration. Get the latest version of GTM Sonar here. Just a minor update this time. I added some informative text to the pop-up, along with an error screen if something goes wrong. Another change is that now when an element is added to debugDL, a counter on the Browser Action icon will start climbing, representing the number of objects in the array. Read More…

(Last updated June 2014: Read the latest post on the extension, GTM Sonar v1.2.) I updated my Chrome Extension, GTM Auto-Event Listener Debugger v1.1. I released the first version a couple of days ago. The extension can be used to debug Google Tag Manager’s auto-event tracking and its compatibility with web page markup. Download the latest version here. I did some major changes, and here’s the rundown. I transferred all debugger actions into a pop-up, which opens when you click the Browser Action. Read More…

(Last updated June 2014: Read the latest post on the extension, GTM Sonar v1.2.) Many of the Google Tag Manager articles on this blog could be considered hacks, in that they extend the out-of-the-box features of GTM in ways that will surely not be officially supported by Google. The crux of the problem is that lots of folks are taken by surprise when GTM refuses to work properly on their site, or when they have trouble tracking key elements on the page template. Read More…

…or How My Organic Traffic Went Through The Roof. It’s been one of the craziest 365 days in my life, and I thought it would be apt to write a bit about all the stuff that’s taken place. I haven’t really been talking about myself in my guides and other previous posts, so please indulge me, for once! The beginning A year ago I had just quit my job at my previous employer, Innofactor Plc. Read More…

Over the last couple of posts I’ve mainly been doing proof-of-concept (POC) tests with Google Tag Manager. The great thing about a POC is that you don’t really need to have any viable results or insight-driving technological innovations. The point is to showcase some feature of the platform on which the experiment was conducted. In this post, I’ll take a care-free step into the world of POCs again. My goal is to do a simple split test in order to identify which variant of a landing page (or key element thereof) produces the most conversions. Read More…

Let’s say you want to set up a rudimentary email alert system in your Google Tag Manager implementation. Say, for example, you want to receive an email every time an uncaught error occurs on your website. It’s not a very good use case, since a large website can spawn hundreds of uncaught exceptions in a short period of time, but let’s just pretend for now. If you know your JavaScript, you’ll know that you can’t send mail using client-side code. Read More…