I’ve spent a considerable amount of time talking and writing about how to improve the granularity of your Google Analytics data, especially when using Google Tag Manager. I’ve also gone on and on and on (and on) about customTask, which makes adding metadata to the Google Analytics hits dispatched from your website a breeze. In this article, I’ll introduce a simple way to add yet another level of detail to your GA hits, using customTask as the method of choice.

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When working with the analytics of single-page applications (SPA), there are a number of things to pay attention to. For example, you need to make sure that Google Analytics doesn’t break your session attribution, and that you are not inadvertently inflating your page speed timing metrics. Actually, there are so many “gotchas” when it comes to SPA tracking in tools like Google Analytics that you just can’t get by with a plug-and-play implementation.

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Last updated 22 May 2019: Added expiration of currently open tabs. In this article, Jethro Nederhof of Snowflake Analytics fame and I will introduce you to some pretty neat web browser APIs. The purpose of these APIs is to find out more about how the user navigated to the current page, and what’s going on with their browser tabs. There are so many things you can do with this new information.

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Here’s a quick tip in response to a query in Twitter by Riccardo Mares. By making a small change to the Google Tag Manager container snippet, you can have the <script> element generated by the snippet notify the page as soon as the Google Tag Manager library has downloaded. What you do with this information is up to you. If you are working directly with the google_tag_manager interface, for example, it might make sense to not act until the interface has been established.

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Here’s a hacky #GTMTips tip for you. Have you ever had a Google Tag Manager container, where you’ve been updating your Google Analytics tags over the years? And perhaps these tags (and, today, Google Analytics Settings variables) have been updated with an ever-expanding list of Custom Dimensions? And perhaps this list of Custom Dimensions is sorted willy-nilly, because once you have 50+ rows, it just doesn’t seem like a fun thing to do to go over each row and update them so that they are sorted by Custom Dimension index?

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Maybe you knew this, maybe you didn’t, but requests sent from your website (or app) to Google Analytics have a maximum size. Or, more specifically, the payload size (meaning the actual content body of the request) has a maximum. This maximum size of the payload is 8192 bytes. This means, basically, that the entire parameter string sent to Google Analytics servers can be no longer than 8192 characters in length. The thing is, if the payload exceeds this, Google Analytics simply drops the hit.

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When using the All Elements trigger in Google Tag Manager, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it captures all clicks on the page. It’s also brutally accurate - it captures clicks on the exact element that was below the mouse button when a click happened. This means that when working with the All Elements trigger, you need to be more careful when identifying the correct element you actually want to track clicks on.

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