Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. (more…)

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]

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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!

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In my series on creative uses of Google Tag Manager and Analytics, here is a specific use case I thought i’d share with you.

I recently saw my blog content got ripped and reposted on another website, laced with porn content. Here is how I fought back with the help of Google Tag Manager.

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Ever since Google released Google Universal Analytics, they have been getting flak for their lack of DoubleClick support for Universal Analytics, whereas “classic” Google Analytics got all the features: tighter integration with DoubleClick, remarketing, demographic information, etc.

The answer Google (and certified partners such as Hub’Sales) gave early adopters has always been “SOON”. Clearly that was not enough to sate the data appetites of our beloved analytics nerds.

I personally don’t see Google releasing DoubleClick integration any time soon. I was hoping they would release it at the same time as the San Francisco eMetrics summit in March, like they usually do. Then I figure they’d wait until September, when the Google Analytics Certified Partners conference usually happens – they make big announcements then.

So I figured i’d bid my time just like everyone else but I received this from the Google Universal Analytics product team a moment ago: before getting Remarketing, Google Universal Analytics is going to get native integration with Google Voice to provide TeleRemarketing support in Google Analytics.

If you use Google Voice to place telemarketing calls, its API will automatically export call data into Google Analytics, which you can then use as a remarketing list for classic GA. You can also export the list of phone numbers and resell them to telemarketing firms, using the standard export format. Qualified telemarketing lists will sell for more (or less) depending on how well qualified the leads are.

Don’t believe me? Maybe you shouldn’t. At any rate, tomorrow (April 2nd) stay tuned to the Google Analytics official blog for an announcement I’m sure you’ll appreciate 😉

[UPDATE] Google Tag Manager Data Layer for WordPress is now available on GitHub

[UPDATE] You guys are too lazy and prefer Duracell Tomi’s plugin 🙂

This year again, I was invited to talk at Superweek, the premier Analytics/PPC conference in Eastern Europe.
I talked about tag management best practices and mentioned my Google Tag Manager data layer for WordPress implementation. In this post, I am sharing my setup with you.

Ready? Let’s modify your theme!

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