This blog post walks through the process of adding a jQuery function to a custom HTML tag in Google Tag Manager in order to populate tags with text or other information available on the page. While Google Tag Manager (GTM) has many useful built-in features for targeting certain areas of the page for event tracking, sometimes ... Read more
This post shows how to set up 301 redirects to track vanity URLs in analytics tools like Google Analytics and IBM Digital Analytics (Coremetrics). This will ensure marketing query strings are appended to the destination page, so that marketing sources can be correctly tracked. Vanity URLs for Marketing Adding tracking parameters to URLs is an ... Read more
This is a followup to the post on debugging Coremetrics without TagBar. In that post we walked through how to access and understand the query strings that get sent to Coremetrics servers while a user clicks around a website. These query strings populate the tags that get set on each page to identify user actions. ... Read more
HTTP SNIFFING FOR WEB ANALYSTS - WHY? As web analysts we need to be able to see and test the technical details of tags, so that we know exactly how the data is being collected. For Coremetrics, however, one thing that can be difficult about viewing and debugging tags is that the official Coremetrics tag ... Read more
2017 UPDATE: this post from 2012 described the cookies used by "classic" Google Analytics (ga.js), which has now largely been replaced by Universal Analytics (analytics.js). While the old version of GA stored information client-side in user cookies, Universal Analytics instead uses just a single cookie to store a user ID, and then processes all the ... Read more
During a web analytics implementation, or while tracking down the source of tracking errors, it's important to check what's being sent to the analytics servers. Coremetrics provides 3 ways to debug or QA an implementation: 1) The Coremetrics TagBar. This is the everyday staple of QA'ing. It's an Internet Explorer/Firefox browser plug-in that shows ... Read more
