So your website is equipped with Google Tag Manager (good).
But your webmaster/IT contact is AWOL/bankrupt/defunct (bad).
On top of that, let’s assume that you’re trying to debug something complex such as an e-commerce transaction but you have no way to place test orders to perform basic debugging.
Long story short: debugging Google Tag Manager can prove tricky! But fear not, here is one reliable method you can use!
Google Tag Manager prepares support for other major tags
February 2019 EDIT: Google announced at Superweek Hungary the imminent release of tag templates, allowing for more tag flexibility!
If you use Google Tag Manager on a daily basis like I do (or hourly in my case), you probably love the fact that you can tie in tags for the entire Google ecosystem, especially now that Google released native support for YouTube tracking.
Continue reading “Google Tag Manager prepares support for other major tags”Google Universal Analytics Cheat Sheet – Measurement Protocol Parameters
Here is a Google Universal Analytics Cheat Sheet to help you make sure you use the right parameters to track data on your websites and mobiles apps!
Working on Hub’Scan means I need to master every single aspect of Google Universal Analytics data collection. This means I get to maintain an accurate, updated list of parameters for the 500+ tags in the Hub’Scan library.
Don’t get me wrong, there are Google Universal Analytics cheat sheets out there but they are not complete and the official Google reference does not provide a list of all parameters.
Continue reading “Google Universal Analytics Cheat Sheet – Measurement Protocol Parameters”
Should you switch to Google Analytics’ Global Site Tag?
2020 October UPDATE: With the release of Google Analytics 4 (App+Web/Firebase), the old tracking code (analytics.js) is no longer supported, only GA4 and gtag.js are supported going forward.
2019 September UPDATE: In September of 2018, Apple rolled out its Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) 2.0 program. When ITP is activated, third-party cookies can only track a user’s activity across sites for 24 hours from the exact moment a user visits a website. After this 24-hour window, these third-party cookies are only able to “remember” a user’s login information. With ITP, all third-party cookies are gone after thirty days.[link]
Recommendation
Use Google Analytics tracking via GTM in order to avoid any code conflict and use a conversion linker
In August 2017, Google announced the Google Universal Analytics Global Site Tag.
The announcement triggered a few discussions on Twitter, with digital marketers and IT folks worldwide asking: “is it time to upgrade already?”
This post explains what is at stake with the Global Site Tag and why you should switch – or not.
Continue reading “Should you switch to Google Analytics’ Global Site Tag?”How to embed DataStudio reports in Web pages
You will be happy to learn that you can now embed DataStudio reports into your web pages.
If, like me, you are a Google Data Studio junkie/power user, you may have felt frustrated by the lack of report embedding and integration into websites such as intranets.
Continue reading “How to embed DataStudio reports in Web pages”
Tracking AMP pages with Google Analytics and Tag Manager
So you took a leap of faith and adapted your site to support the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) format? This can be quite the constraint at first but it pays off in the longer term because it will make your content both more accessible on mobile devices and more visible in Google search results.
Having said that, there are other considerations besides making your content compliant with a streamlined mobile user experience. For instance, AMP does not support JavaScript by default. If your initial reaction was “Eeek, my tags won’t work!”, you were absolutely right. And yes, that includes Google Analytics and other tags.
In this post, I will cover how to setup Google Analytics tracking on AMP pages with Google Tag manager.
Continue reading “Tracking AMP pages with Google Analytics and Tag Manager”Revisiting the bounce rate
Every month, I get quite a few questions about the bounce rate, a metric that is supposed to provide insights into visitor engagement.
How much time did users really spend on a given page?
Did they find what they were looking for?
Why the heck do they leave my site right away instead of browsing more pages?
How can my bounce rate help me make sense of this?
Should I consider that a “bounce” occurs after 10, 15 or 30 seconds? This post is an attempt at demystifying a common metric that is still used and abused. I will cover how to define and calculate the bounce rate, how to analyze it and how to use it to improve your digital marketing campaigns.
How can I handle Google Analytics referrer spam?
So I recently got dragged into multiple discussions about Google Analytics referrer spam and ways to effectively block it so that report data is clean and that channel attribution makes sense. In this (long) post, I’d like to share a method I’ve put together to exclude Google Analytics referrer spam, which requires enlisting the help of Google Tag Manager. Continue reading “How can I handle Google Analytics referrer spam?”
Google Analytics property ID management with Google Tag Manager
If, like me, you handle enterprise customers with a significant number of websites (we’re talking hundreds, if not thousands), one of your worst nightmares is Google Analytics property ID Management.
In this post, I’ll share with you one method I use to manage the Google Analytics property ID lists in Google Tag Manager, using an adaptable lookup table system.
[EDIT: 18 May, 2016 – code supports regular expressions]
Continue reading “Google Analytics property ID management with Google Tag Manager”
Measuring the impact of adblocking with Google Analytics and GTM
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about adblocking and its impact on digital marketing campaigns. Most digital pundits will blame adblocking for everything that is wrong with online ad campaigns – very often with no idea of what they’re talking about. In this post, I describe a method to measure said impact without having to rely on preconceived ideas or resort to guesstimates. Of course, this is done with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, which, ironically, are also the target of adblocking plugins – but we’ll get into that later.
Interested? See you after the jump!
Continue reading “Measuring the impact of adblocking with Google Analytics and GTM”