Simo Ahava's blog

There is a new version of this guide for GTM V2 here. (Last updated April 2014) I see Google Tag Manager’s operational model as an analogy of Montesquieu’s three-branched government theory (don’t leave just yet, I’m getting somewhere with this). We have the legislative power of tags (what should be done), the judiciary power of macros (explore the context and circumstance of each tag), and the executive power of rules (make the tag happen). Read More…

There is a new version of this guide for GTM V2 here. (Last updated April 2014) I see Google Tag Manager’s operational model as an analogy of Montesquieu’s three-branched government theory (don’t leave just yet, I’m getting somewhere with this). We have the legislative power of tags (what should be done), the judiciary power of macros (explore the context and circumstance of each tag), and the executive power of rules (make the tag happen). Read More…

Here are a few quotes I found on the web regarding tag management and IT departments: Original text here Original text here Original text here Original text here And of course there’s the home page of the Google Tag Manager website itself: The problem in all these quotes is in the rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong, all of them make a valid point, but they also do their best to antagonize IT as a slow, antiquated, process-driven, bureaucratic, revenue-hating, nerd-monster, whose sole objective is to make life difficult for marketers. Read More…

When push comes to shove, I’m a pretty lazy guy. I enjoy nothing more than just to stretch my legs on a couch, pick up my iPad, and read what’s going on in the world. I skip the news, since they’re just full of depressing stories. Instead, I head over to my favorite Google+ communities to see what’s new in the blogosphere. This approach has led me to some pretty amazing individuals, whom I follow like a suckerfish. Read More…

Ever so often I come across a Google Tag Manager setup where GTM’s own auto-event listeners don’t perform the task they were supposed to. Listener problems seem to be a hot topic in Google+ and the Product Forums as well. There may be many reasons why your listeners don’t work, but a very common trend is that you have conflicting JavaScript libraries or scripts running on your page. Let’s explore how listeners work before tackling the problem. Read More…

I’ve written a new Variable Guide for Google Tag Manager, which covers the new GTM UI. This guide is for the old UI. You might be vaguely familiar with macros if you’ve ever used a computer. Basically, whenever you perform a complicated task with a simple gesture, or reuse complex code with a simple input mechanism, you’re using macros. Think keyboard shortcuts. In Google Tag Manager, this is the essence of macros. Read More…

Having just come hot of the press with my latest article on GTM and Content Grouping which, to my delight, Bounteous had written an amazing tutorial on earlier, Brian Kuhn and the amazing Google Tag Manager development team came out with another incredible new feature: The Lookup Table Macro. In software engineering, a lookup table is an array which takes away a layer of complexity in runtime computation, and replaces it with a simple value assignment based on array indexing. Read More…

Content Grouping is a nice new feature from the good folks at Google Analytics. Basically, it allows you to group your content according to a logical structure. You can create up to five Content Groupings, and you can have as many Content Groups within these groupings as you like. The difference between a Content Grouping and Content Group is hierarchy. The second is a member of the first. Read Justin Cutroni’s post on Content Groupings to get you started. Read More…

Have you ever stopped to think about what the chain of events was that led you to a particular decision? Maybe not, but in web analytics it is something that should be considered. After all, there is something counter-intuitive about analytics tools such as Google Analytics, which require us to think in terms of clicks and recorded events that occur on the website, during the visit. Thankfully, we have evolved as a species, and we no longer place too much emphasis on last click attribution. Read More…

(Last updated March 2014) This post is the final chapter of a trilogy. The ultimate refinement, if you will. It all started with my foray into the murky waters of context, when I tested how weather data could be used to provide extra information about site visits. When I wrote that post, I had two trepidations: 1) does sending the API call with every single page view affect site performance negatively, and 2) does forcing the page view call to wait for the API call to complete affect the quality of visit metrics. Read More…

There is a new version of this post for GTM V2 here. While going over my previous post about using weather conditions to segment data in Google Analytics, I started thinking about performance issues. Since I’m using a visit-scope custom dimension, it seems futile to have it send the weather details with every single page load. The odds of the weather changing drastically during one visit are slim (unless you live in the UK), and I have yet to come up with a good reason to change my on-site behavior because the weather changed from a drizzle to a downpour. Read More…