Google Tag Manager

Cross-domain tracking, in Google Analytics, is the process of passing information stored in browser cookies from one domain to another. Due to web browsers’ same-origin policy, a browser cookie is only available to the domain it is written on and all its subdomains (by default). Since Google Analytics uses cookies to persist the Client ID, once the user moves from domain to domain it’s important to somehow pass this Client ID, too. Read More…

Last updated 2 March 2018. Every now and then you might be urged to run Google Tag Manager and/or Google Analytics locally, meaning without the benefit of a web server serving your files. In other words, you’re loading an HTML file from your computer in the web browser. You can identify a locally run file by the file:/// protocol in the address bar. Now, deploying Google Tag Manager onto that file with the hopes of running Google Analytics requests locally isn’t quite simple. Read More…

There are times when I’m disappointed with Google’s developer documentation, especially for Google Tag Manager. Most of the time they get it right, and I’d say around 80% of questions being thrown around the forums can be answered just by reading through the documentation. But there are some cases where the documentation is misleading or even downright dangerous. One of these cases is Enhanced Ecommerce. This isn’t going to be a thorough critique of said documentation, but the tip in this post has to do with one of the examples that the documentation gives for measuring Product Clicks. Read More…

Enhanced Ecommerce is a very useful set of reports in Google Analytics. They extend the standard Ecommerce funnel, which measures only purchases, and allow you to observe products from the very first impression, through various interactions, all the way to the purchase and even beyond, if the user wanted a refund. Google has some solid documentation on how to implement and interpret Enhanced Ecommerce, but if there’s one area that would deserve more illumination, it’s attribution. Read More…

Have you created a Chrome Extension, and now you’re dying to find out how users are interacting with it? Perhaps you want to see what features are (not) being utilized, or perhaps you’re just interested in knowing if people are actually using it. In this article, I’ll show you how to configure Google Tag Manager, so that it works in the restricted sandbox of the Chrome Extension. You’ll need to make some tweaks, but it’s still perfectly doable. Read More…

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. Read More…

This article is a guest article by someone from the analytics community I really look up to. Dan Wilkerson is an analytics developer at Bounteous, a company I hold in high esteem. Dan is one of the smartest technical analytics experts out there, and a large bulk of the awesome scripts and hacks that Bounteous produces (almost on a daily basis) have been orchestrated by him. So I’m very pleased to give the floor to Dan, so that he can tell you all about using the pesky document. Read More…

Quite a while ago, I wrote an article on what I considered (then) to be my favorite Google Tag Manager resources. Many of them are still very valid, but I still wanted to write a follow-up. Times have changed, and GTM is very different from what it was two years ago when I wrote the post. So in this article, I want to divert your attention to 10 blogs, 10 articles, and 10 people - all which are and/or share excellent Google Tag Manager content on a periodic basis. Read More…

Back back to the friggin’ basics. Almost two years ago, I wrote a two-parter on how to have fun with Google Tag Manager: Part 1, and Part 2. The first part had a nice exercise for tracking JavaScript Errors as Google Analytics Events, using the recently published “JavaScript Error Listener” Tag. Well, that was in GTM V1. Now we’ve been smoothly sailing with the wonderful new interface for well over a year, and it’s time to update some of these nifty tricks. Read More…

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. Read More…