Google Analytics’ e-commerce tracking is generally the most developer-intensive part of a Google Analytics implementation, because it requires a developer-built data layer on the transaction confirmation page. The data layer collects all the relevant data — the transaction ID, the checkout total, the product names, the prices, and so on — and lays them out … Read more
If you have a blog or work with content, you will likely want to know which type of posts are viewed most frequently by your readers. Google Analytics provides a lot of options for tracking content: it will show you what specific posts were the most viewed in the Top Pages report, allows you to … Read more
This post provides downloadable Google Tag Manager (GTM) scripts and a walkthrough of the necessary steps for getting clickstream data out of Google Analytics. This clickstream data already exists behind the scenes; every time a user takes a tracked action on your website, like viewing a page or clicking a button, the data about that … Read more
September 2018 Update: URL Dynamic Parameters are back! May 2018 Update: It looks like this feature has been (temporarily?) disabled by Facebook, at least for some accounts. There’s discussion online about it not working anymore, and information on these dynamic parameters has been edited out from the official documentation. The original article is still presented … Read more
Working as a Google Analytics / Google Tag Manager consultant, it’s common to navigate around the web with tools like the Google Analytics Debugger and Google Analytics Tag Assistant still active in the browser. These tools display information about every tracking call sent to Google Analytics’ servers, allowing you to view and debug the GA implementation of … Read more
Tracking the number of onsite search results is useful for finding common searches for which few, or zero, results were returned, so that you can address gaps in your product or content offerings. This metric can also be used to analyze the correlation between search result counts and conversion rates. While the built-in onsite search … Read more
In September 2017, Google released native YouTube video tracking in Google Tag Manager (GTM), which makes setting up Google Analytics event tracking for YouTube super easy. This blog post shows the steps to add YouTube video tracking to GTM, or you can skip to the end and download and import the pre-configured setup into your … Read more
This is the fourth and final post in a series on design patterns for tracking events in Google Analytics (GA) using Google Tag Manager (GTM). This pattern combines developer pushes from the data layer with tags and variables in GTM. It describes the case where a single tag is set through a combination of data … Read more
This is the third post in a series on design patterns for tracking events in Google Analytics (GA) using Google Tag Manager (GTM). This third pattern is a developer-focused implementation pattern where your site developers push all the required information into a data layer. This method is sometimes referred to as a “pass through” method. … Read more
There are many types of site interactions you may be interested in tracking: scroll distance down a page, clicks on a hero image, email address submissions, and so on. All of these can be tracked using Google Analytics’ event tracking tags, which in turn can be set through Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM is a … Read more
