Back back to the friggin’ basics. Almost two years ago, I wrote a two-parter on how to have fun with Google Tag Manager: Part 1, and Part 2. The first part had a nice exercise for tracking JavaScript Errors as Google Analytics Events, using the recently published “JavaScript Error Listener” Tag. Well, that was in GTM V1. Now we’ve been smoothly sailing with the wonderful new interface for well over a year, and it’s time to update some of these nifty tricks.

Continue reading

I’m currently at SMX München, which is still one of my favorite conferences in Europe. The quality of the talks is superb, and the organization is just perfect. So today, after my talk (joint session with the awesome Dave Sottimano), I was listening to the inimitable Mike King give an excellent presentation together with Ari Nahmani on technical skill prerequisites for all digital marketers today. Needless to say, I strongly agree with their view that digital marketing has always been a technical discipline, and the web is getting more and more complex each day that passes.

Continue reading

A couple of days ago, I wrote an article on tracking content engagement. Even though the solution itself works, and it’s a really neat trick if I can say so myself, it has its problems. After all the glory I showered on User Timings in Google Analytics, they have one serious flaw: they cap at 10,000 samples per day. What a ridiculous, arbitrary limit. In any case, this means that if you have enough traffic to accumulate 10K user timing hits per day, it means that the solution I provided in the previous article will not work for you, as the Pageviews will not be capped, meaning the calculation of Total Engaged Time / Pageviews will be skewed.

Continue reading

When looking at Google Analytics reports, you’d think you get a pretty good idea of how people are interacting with your site, right? I mean, you’re tracking events here, pageviews there, and user timings, custom dimensions, custom metrics, and calculated metrics are all part of your daily lingo. But you’re also probably aware of how futile this tracking is. After all, all you’re seeing are numbers that reflect certain outcomes the visitors have produced on the website, and how these outcomes match against your preconceived goals and objectives, right?

Continue reading

This is a really cool feature for Google Analytics data collection, of which I’ve heard very, very little buzz. It’s a way to debug any and all hits sent to the Google Analytics endpoint at https://www.google-analytics.com/collect. In all simplicity, you just need to copy the entire URL of the HTTP request to your clipboard, paste it into a web browser, and add /debug between the hostname and /collect.

Continue reading

Every now and then I run into a problem which needs some creativity to find a fix. When choosing a course of action, I tend to land first on an extremely complicated solution. However, if I’m patient enough, I manage to whittle it down to something far more manageable and efficient. In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you one of these extremely simple solutions to a problem which you might normally overcomplicate.

Continue reading

In this article, I’m going to tackle one of the most frequently asked questions out there: Can you run Google Analytics using the snippet AND using a Google Tag Manager Tag on the same page? There are many facets to this query, so I’ll try to tackle as many of them as I possibly can. First, a terminology rant. You hear lots of talk about “on-page” and “inline” Google Analytics tracking, as that’s what’s used to describe the non-GTM way of tracking Google Analytics.

Continue reading