Google Tag Manager

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. These people have written a bunch of great articles, which have helped countless people with their Google Tag Manager installations. Or they might be really active in the online communities which people turn to for advice.

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. You see, when you attach an event listener to an element in your Document Object Model (the collection of all elements on your page), the listener waits for the element to produce the action it is listening for.

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. You can do away with a lot of complexity by resorting to macros, especially if you ever find that you need the same piece of code or the same operation over and over again.

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. To put it simply, a lookup table looks through an array of source values, and assigns a value to the target depending on what the source value is. Well, maybe it’s easiest to show it in an image:

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.

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.

(Last updated June 2014) Google Analytics provides us with a nifty way of tracking social interactions. With a simple plugin, you can track how many +1s and Likes your pages accumulate.

This guide shows you how to activate social interaction tagging with Google Tag Manager and Universal Analytics. The instructions are for Facebook Likes, Google+ +1s (now deprecated since Google Analytics tracks +1s automatically), Twitter Tweets and Pinterest Pins.

Note that if you use a third-party API (e.g. AddThis) these tricks probably won’t work. You’ll need to use the API functions themselves to enable tracking.

There is a new version of this post for GTM V2 here.

The Google Analytics Summit came and went, and thanks to the Live Stream, everyone could participate. We were treated to a rapid-fire selection of Google Analytics’ new features, and this post sheds light on one of these in particular: automated event tracking in Google Tag Manager.

Auto-event tracking introduces a nice feature, which does what tag managers ought to do: it provides functionality without HTML template editing. This isn’t always a good thing, since automation is usually generic and only works for a couple of viable scenarios, but especially for these generic use cases, this new feature is a great addition to GTM’s already impressive feature list.

So here we are again. Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager, the dynamic duo, ready to strike again.

First, remember to check my previous two tips for UA and GTM use in custom scenarios:

• Weather as a custom dimension
• Tracking page load time

In this post, I visit the idea of adjusted bounce rate, which I came across a year ago in the Google Analytics blog.

Adjusted bounce rate basically refers to tweaking the traditional bounce rate collection method (single engagement hits / total visits) so that visits which only included a single page view would not count towards a bounce, as long as they met some qualitative requirements.

In Google Analytics, you can monitor your site speed and get a decent overview of what pages are contributing positively and negatively to site speed. The problem with page load time metric is that it’s an average based on a sample. You can modify the sample rate with setSiteSpeedSampleRate(), but for me that’s not bloody well good enough.

(UPDATE 28.3.2014: This post is still valid, but an implementation with User Timings is a much smarter way to measure actual page load time. I’ll be doing a short update at some point in the near future.)