Universal Analytics

Some years ago, I wrote a post on how to track cross-domain iframes when using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. That solution relied on hitCallback to decorate the iframe, and now that I look back on it, it has its shortcomings. For one, the older solution used hitCallback which, while being reliable in that Google Analytics has definitely loaded with the linker plugin when the method is called, doesn’t take into account the possible race condition of the script running before the iframe has been loaded. Read More…

When Google released gtag.js, the new, global tracking library designed to (eventually) replace analytics.js, many Universal Analytics practitioners and users were confused (see e.g. Jeff’s great overview here). It seemed like gtag.js wasn’t really solving any immediate problem, since analytics.js had done a bang-up job with Universal Analytics tracking for all these years. However, gtag’s modus operandi is the ability to leverage the same semantic information (distributed across dataLayer!) across a number of Google products, starting with GA and AdWords. Read More…

I really like Google Optimize. It has a fairly intuitive UI, setting up experiments is easy, and there’s integrations for both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics built into the system. It’s still a JavaScript-based, client-side A/B-testing tool, so problems with flicker and asynchronous loading are ever-present (though this is somewhat mitigated by the page-hiding snippet). One issue with the Google Analytics integration is the difficulty of creating segments for sessions where the users were actively participating in the experiment. Read More…

With GDPR looming around the corner, it’s time to explore the options you have at your disposal for respecting the new, stricter regulations for tracking users and for collecting data about their visits to your website. UPDATE 20 June 2018: Google has released the allowAdFeatures field which renders the solution below redundant (at least for the displayFeaturesTask part of it). Please refer to this article for more details on how to conditionally block the advertising hit to DoubleClick. Read More…

Universal Analytics can collect Page Timing data from users that load your pages. This data is populated in to the Behavior -> Site Speed -> Page Timings report, and it’s a very useful feature for optimizing your website. However, there’s a murky underside to this generous feature. The way Page Timings collection works is that when Pageview hits are sent from the site, a sample of these (1% by default) are automatically followed by a timing hit which includes page performance data grabbed from the Navigation Timing API. Read More…

Here we are again, revisiting an old theme. When using Google Tag Manager, we often want to send the contents of the same tag to multiple Universal Analytics properties. With on-page GA, this used to be quite simple, as all you had to do was create a new tracker and then just remember to run the ga('trackerName.send'...) commands to all the trackers (or you could use my duplicator plugin). With GTM, your options are more limited, since Google Tag Manager abstracts the tracker object, giving you far fewer tools to work with. Read More…

One of the things I’ve recommended from the get-go is to always send the Client ID to Google Analytics with your users’ hits. This is very useful for adding a level of granularity to your tracking. At first, I recommended using an Event tag to do this. Then I modified my approach a little so that you could send it with your initial Page View (thus not inflating your hit counts). Read More…

Let’s face it - most of us use Google Tag Manager for one main purpose: to deploy and configure Google Analytics tracking on a website. I’d wager that once you start using GTM, you won’t be implementing Universal Analytics the old-fashioned way, with on-page code, any more. But running Universal Analytics tags through GTM isn’t yet a perfect workflow. We’re still missing things like proper plugin support and the option to properly differentiate between the tracker and the hit - both of which are easy to do with an on-page implementation. Read More…

Google Analytics’ Site Speed reports are pretty darn great. They report automatically on various milestones in the process the browser undertakes when rendering content. These reports leverage the Navigation Timing API of the web browser, and they are (typically) collected on the first Page View hit of a page. And this is all fine. As I said, it’s a great feature of Google Analytics, and lends itself handily to spotting issues in the quite complex client-server negotiation that goes on when your web browser requests content from the web server. Read More…

_This is a guest post by Stephen Harris from Seer Interactive . He was kind enough to share his awesome solution in this blog, so I’m very grateful indeed for his contribution._ If Google Tag Manager is loaded as the primary instrument for tracking on a webpage (as it should be), then all webpage tracking could and should be configurable via GTM. But we don’t always control the circumstances, and it’s not uncommon to face hardcoded Google Analytics tracking outside of GTM. Read More…