Every now and then we want to create a bridge between the stateful machines we send data to (e.g. Google Analytics), and the stateless environment where we collect the data itself (e.g. Google Tag Manager). This is not easy. There is no synergy between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager which would let the latter understand anything about things like sessions or landing pages or Bounce Rates. One thing we can reliably measure, however, is whether or not the visitor is a New User in Google Analytics.

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Enhanced Ecommerce is undoubtedly an excellent feature of Google Analytics. It provides us with a set of reports that truly extend the capabilities of funnel-based website analysis. As I’ve shown before, it’s also very useful for tracking other transactional events on your site, such as content engagement. However, here’s the thing. It’s not very easy to implement. Even if you get everything right according to the documentation, there are still quite a number of pitfalls, and many of the learnings emerge only through experience.

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Unfortunately, iFrames still exist. They are used to embed content from one page into another. Frames are horrible, nasty things, very often riddled with cross-domain problems, performance issues, responsive design obstructions and other crap from the nether pits of hell. Regardless, if you’re stuck with an iFrame which also collects data to your Google Analytics property, for example, you probably want to prevent at least the first Page View from firing, since otherwise you’ll be double-counting Page Views: once on the main page and once in the iFrame.

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(Updated 13 August 2017) A little over a year ago, in April 2014, I wrote the post “Advanced Form Tracking In Google Tag Manager”, and it’s been at the top of my best seller list ever since. Turns out that many people are rightfully passionate about making the web forms on their websites as fluid and intuitive as possible, since a web form is often the only thing that stands between a prospect and their transformation into clienthood.

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A recent update to Google Tag Manager introduced a feature which has been on the wishlist of many users for a long time. It’s called Tag sequencing, and its purpose is to facilitate the sequential firing of Tags. The idea is that you can specify a setup and a cleanup for each Tag in your container. This article is intended to function as a quick tour of the feature.

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The web is stateless. It’s basically blind to your past, and it does a poor job of predicting what you might do in the future. When you browse to a website, the browser requests the page from the web server, and then proceeds to render it for you. This is a detached, clinical process, and any personalized or stateful data transfer is left to the sophistication of your web server.

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With the advent of Enhanced Ecommerce for Universal Analytics, a new scope was introduced for Custom Dimensions and Metrics. Product scope can be used to send information about each product that is sent through Enhanced Ecommerce, but it’s not exactly the most logical or intuitive thing to wrap your head around. In this #GTMTips post, we’ll take a look at how to implement Product-Scoped Custom definitions via Google Tag Manager, and I’ll quickly explain how they work in relation to queries and reports you might want to build on top of them.

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