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
Every report in Google Analytics contains dimensions and metrics. Dimensions describe the data, and metrics measure them. Custom metrics let you measure additional items beyond the default measurements like "sessions" and "total events". It's easy to overlook them because it's often possible to get similar results in other ways (e.g. events + goals), but custom ... Read more
Using regex to match specific numbers of sub-directories in a URL can be very helpful for Google Analytics. When I configure a new Google Analytics view, I'll usually set up Content Grouping so we can see traffic by page type rather than just to a specific page. Ideally there's a value in the data layer ... Read more
Depending on your site setup, a user may navigate between multiple subdomains while on your site. For example, they may start with blog.xyz.com, then go to www.xyz.com, and so on. Google Analytics has a Hostname (subdomain) report located at Audience > Technology > Network > select the Hostname tab. In this report, the sum of ... Read more
