Google Tag Manager

The inimitable Craig Sullivan gave me an idea for a continuation to my latest post on form abandonment tracking. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to track the time users spend on your form fields. We’re going to use the User Timings hit type, and we’ll send the data for just one form. With small modifications, you can expand the script to cover multiple forms on a page.

This simple solution tracks the time the user spends on each form field by measuring the distance between the focus event and the blur or change event. The first one occurs when a form field is entered, and the latter depends on if a value changed (change) or no change was registered (blur).

Form abandonment isn’t always easy to define. Most often, it refers to when someone starts to fill in an HTML form, but leaves the page without submitting it. As a definition, this works nicely. However, with multi-page forms it naturally refers only to the last page of the form. Also, especially with government institutions, forms can be saved to be submitted later. Here, again, form abandonment must be reconsidered.

In this article, I’ll go over four different ways to track form abandonment in Google Analytics, using Google Tag Manager to setup the tracking. The definition I’ll use is the first one: abandonment occurs when someone enters a form page, but leaves it without submitting the form. Do note that GA might not be the right tool to actually track issues with your form. There are dedicated resources for that, such as ClickTale or Hotjar. But if you want to measure form engagement as part of a more coherent visitor journey, then it might make sense to track this engagement (or lack thereof) in Google Analytics.

In JavaScript, if you want to access an Array member, you use square bracket notation to retrieve the value stored at a specific index. Indices are numbered in order, with the first index always being at location zero (0). This means that to get the first value stored in Array simo, you’d use something like:

var firstValue = simo[0];

In Google Tag Manager, you can push Arrays into the Data Layer. However, the Data Layer Variable type, which you use to retrieve values stored in the Data Layer, does not support the aforementioned square bracket notation in its fields. Instead, you need to use a special, proprietary format to access Array members.

Maintaining the list of Referral Exclusions in Google Analytics admin is a pain. Especially if you have a webstore, the number of referral sources you need to exclude to avoid sessions being split can grow really fast. Also, it’s not like the list is has the most intuitive UI. Instead of a handy text area where you could just copy-paste stuff, you’re left with a horrible line-by-line list, and there’s no way of copying lists across properties or anything useful like that.

What a nice way to wake up to a new day, when brand-spanking new features have been released for Google Tag Manager.

The two features I want to introduce here are Folders in the UI, and code syntax highlighting in Custom HTML Tags and Custom JavaScript Variables.

Folders

Folders is one of those features that has been requested for over and over again since day one. The UI clutter in GTM is a serious problem, especially when dealing with dozens and dozens of items in a single view. With folders, you can logically categorize individual items, so it should dramatically reduce clutter. That is, once the feature is more refined.

One of the glaring omissions in the Enhanced Ecommerce reports of Universal Analytics is the ability to calculate cart value for products. Cart value, here, is the value that has been added to the cart.

This value can be used to query for products that have the highest discrepancy between cart value and generated revenue. These are missed opportunities of the highest caliber.

With some Custom Metrics magic, we can, however, get cart value into our reports, and we can find our most and least “effective” products with just a glance:

Enhanced Ecommerce is a very nice improvement to the pretty lame, transaction-based Ecommerce tracking in Universal Analytics. Instead of staring blindly at what happens on a receipt page, Enhanced Ecommerce expands your entire webstore into one large funnel labelled “Shopping Behavior”, and you’re able to zoom in on the Checkout funnel as well. Also, the addition of product-scoped tracking is incredibly useful, and it’s enabled us to think of any asset (our content, for example) on our site as something we could track through the Enhanced Ecommerce reports.

Here’s a tip that’s especially important to anyone working with a single-page application. Google Tag Manager persists items in its data model until you either manually delete the variable and/or its value from the data model, or until the user browses away from the page. There’s nothing as annoying as the example in the image below, where a value that was set for an earlier Tag is resent with a new Tag, even though the purpose was to leave it out.

PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is something we need to actively combat against when using Google Analytics, as the platform explicitly forbids sending PII to Google Analytics properties in any size, form, or shape.

One of the most common ways of accidentally passing PII to a property is via query parameters. Many email platforms out there, for example, see no problem in including the user’s email address in the query string, especially when the user follows a link in a newsletter. This is, however, a definite no-no in Google Analytics. Thus, I wanted to create a blanket solution for proactively weeding out potential PII in your Google Analytics Tags deployed via Google Tag Manager.

According to their website, SoundCloud is “the world’s leading social sound platform where anyone can create sounds and share them everywhere”. For artists, it’s a channel for distributing previews of their tracks, and for people like me it’s a nice way to do some API tinkering. To each their own, I guess!

I saw a number of requests in the Google+ Google Tag Manager community about a SoundCloud integration, so I decided to look into it to see if I could just build one.