In 2013, I wrote a guide for Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager on how to poll for weather conditions, and send this information to Google Analytics as a custom dimension of the session. The guide was intended as a technical introduction to Google Tag Manager, and I think …
The Simmer Newsletter
Subscribe to the Simmer newsletter to get the latest news and content from Simo Ahava into your email inbox!
(Updated 15 July 2015: Added a huge simplification. Jump straight to the update at the end.) URL fragments are strings of characters that follow a hash mark (#) in the URL. Typically, they are used for anchor links, where following a link keeps you on the same page but jumps the …
A schema is something that data processing platforms such as Google Analytics apply to the raw hit data coming in from the data source (usually a website). The most visible aspect of Google Analytics’ schema is how it groups, or stitches, the arbitrary, hit-level data …
In Google Tag Manager, every single Tag requires a Trigger to fire. Every single Trigger requires an Event condition to activate. Sometimes, these Event conditions are obfuscated under template semantics, but you can also create a Custom Event Trigger, where you specify the value …
Be honest, can you think of anything that’s more unfair than this: A new Google Tag Manager feature, published at 02:07 AM my time, and with an easter egg hunt involved?! Of course it was the infuriating Charles Farina who found the new feature and claimed the prize. …
This nifty little solution will let you calculate the time spent on pages that are not tracked in Google Analytics by default. These include both bounced landing pages and exit pages. Bounced pages and exit pages lack the necessary subsequent pageview, which Google Analytics uses …
Due to a recent change in the UI (see entry for February 12, 2015 in the release notes), the large and ever-expanding group of fields you could set for your Universal Analytics tags has been mostly removed. Instead, the often obscure Fields to Set selection has been promoted to …
