Google Tag Manager

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. Read More…

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. Read More…

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: Read More…

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. Read More…

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. Read More…

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. Read More…

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. Read More…

Are you (even marginally) interested in one of the most powerful tag management systems out there? Do you want to refresh your memory on how JavaScript works in the web? Do you want to get the most out of Google Tag Manager as the go-to system for all marketing and measurement tagging on your websites? Take the Google Tag Manager Fundamentals Course at the Analytics Academy, then! And take it even if you have no idea what the tool is. Read More…

This is a very simple tip, but judging by the number of queries on the Product Forums, it should prove helpful. Blogger is a free blogging service by Google. Like WordPress, they allow you to run hosted blogs on the blogger.com domain, and they also allow you to modify the HTML source. This, of course, means that you can add the Google Tag Manager code to the HTML template, if you wish (and why wouldn’t you! Read More…

Google Tag Manager has a learning curve. We’ve all gone through it. The developer guide as well as the new and improved help center are very useful, but they do not answer all the questions a thorough implementation project might face. There are many ways to find answers to your questions, and I thought I’d go through some of my favorite options here. Tip 22: Get GTM Assistance To help you in getting help with GTM, there are two things we’ll need to go over: where to look for help, and how to ask for assistance. Read More…