Google Tag Manager Data Layer explained like never before. This is my first official post on ‘Google Tag Manager’ on this blog. I never really touched this topic and I don’t really have any good excuse. All I can say is that I was busy writing about other topics and issues. I have been getting lot of emails from people who want to learn more about Google Tag Manager. To be honest every second email I am getting these days is about fixing a particular technical issue through GTM. But somehow I am getting the impression that marketers believe that GTM can solve all of their tracking issues and that too without IT involvement. But this is simply a myth which needs to be busted. If you have used GTM any longer than few days, you know that GTM does require good knowledge of HTML, DOM and JavaScript as prerequisite. If you have implemented Ecommerce Tracking via GTM, you know that you need the help of a web developer to create data layer for you.
So I am starting my ‘Google Tag Manager’ series with ‘data layer’. What is a dataLayer? Var a=new Array(); The Complexity & Confusion Of Tracking Without Tag Management. SEO Reporting with Google Tag Manager. This has been a big year for keyword (not provided). It has become more difficult than ever to gauge the success of SEO campaigns. That single term is now showing for over 95% of LunaMetrics.com’s organic search traffic! Yikes! Our SEO team has been hard at work finding ways to get back some of that keyword data, through Webmaster Tools, AdWords, and some fancy mathetmatizing.
Reid Bandremer blogged about some ways to combat (not provided) in a post in October. But what if we could do even better? Rather than focusing on a user’s search term, what if we could see, on a page-by-page basis inside Google Analytics, exactly which keywords we optimized those pages for? The following is a way to get optimized keyword data inside Google Analytics, across your entire website, using Google Tag Manager. The optimized keyword is defined according to a set of rules that we control. For this recipe, you’ll need: Ok! We’re going to create a custom dimension called “Optimized Keyword”.
Save this tag! Unlock the Data Layer: A Non-Developer's Guide to GTM. There’s nothing mysterious about the data layer for Google Tag Manager. It’s just a place to hold information so your tags can refer to that info when they need it. Do you need a developer or not though? Can you use the data layer if you’re not a developer? This post discusses how information gets into the data layer, and how tags use that information. How does information get into the data layer? Information is either written into the data layer as part of the page code, or it’s pushed to the data layer later as certain events occur. The information may need to be pulled from the back-end. You can push a lot of information through Tag Manager to the data layer, but some will inevitably have to go through your site’s developers. 1.
When the page loads, its code can contain the data layer with information specific to the content of that page. The order confirmation page needs to load with all the information needed to do ecommerce tracking for each purchase. 2. 3. 1. 2. One Goal, Many Values: Lookup Tables in Google Tag Manager. Google Analytics Events + GTM Lookup Tables = Super Groovy Goal Values! Here’s a familiar refrain: Need KPIs? Assign goal values to your non-ecommerce goals in Google Analytics – for example, calculate the average value of a lead and enter that as the goal value. And a less-familiar verse: Should you settle for the average value? Not if the actual values vary widely. Distributions matter! Suppose you have one lead form for many types of leads. New verse: You don’t have to give them all the same goal value. Send different event values to Google Analytics for each type of lead with a lookup table in Google Tag Manager.
You say your goal is based on the thank-you page URL and not an event? Follow these four steps to add more meaningful values and make your goal data rock. Step 1: Create the lookup table in Google Tag Manager Start making a list of lead types and their corresponding values. The usual method: What percentage of each type of lead turns into a sale? Here’s a much shorter example. Tracking 404 Errors with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. As analysts and marketers, we always want to track positive performance metrics and conversions in Google Analytics.
However, tracking errors is also important to monitor the health of your site and keep track of signals indicating a negative user experience. Accessing this data gives us a better idea of what’s causing users to get lost and wander into the dark, unattached voids of your domain. Knowing where these problem spots are makes it easier to fix internal links or set redirects.
I’ll show you different ways to view where people are hitting these error pages and where they are coming from, either through your existing setup or by using Google Tag Manager to fire events or virtual pageviews. 404 – User Not Impressed As a web user, there’s a good chance that you’ve been acquainted with the ominous “404 Page Not Found” error. Some causes of 404 errors come from No matter how cute or whimsical the page is, a ‘page not found’ error disrupts the user experience. Easy, Existing Options. Google Tag Manager Best Practices. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a powerful tool to add and edit measurement tags without much intervention from the IT department. It is also much easier to use than directly hard coding tags on a website. But creating and managing tags, macros and rules within the GTM still require certain skills. If you are not sure about how to best use the GTM, you may end up with a long list of unmanageable tags, rules and macros in your account or in worst case may end up breaking the website functionality and causing significant financial loss to your client/company.
Following are the best practices for using Google Tag Manager: Best Practice #1: Structure your GTM account correctly Google Tag Manager is made up of accounts, containers and tags. Multiple GTM accounts/containers can cause tracking and diagnosing issues sooner or later. Best Practice #2: Use good naming conventions for GTM configurations GTM configurations are Tags, Macros and Rules.
Follow the steps below to control user access in GTM: 1. Persist dataLayer In Google Tag Manager. Youtube. How to Implement Adjusted Bounce Rate (ABR) via Google Tag Manager [Tutorial] Future-Proof Your Google Analytics Implementation with Google Tag Manager - SwellPath. There has been a lot of talk about Google Tag Manager (GTM) lately, Google even said that Google Tag Manager is serving twice the amount of traffic since April 2013, so I think it’s safe to say that GTM isn’t going anywhere.
If you don’t know what Google Tag Manager is, I’ll let Google explain what it does: “Google Tag Manager lets you add or update your website tags and mobile applications, easily and for free, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks.” Yes, that’s right, without bugging the IT folks. There are plenty of excellent resources for describing the functionality and features of Google Tag Manager, so I’ll link to those if this is relatively new to you.
However, what I want to touch on is how you can “Future Proof” your current Google Analytics implementation by dual-tagging your website with both the Google Analytics Classic Analytics (CA) and Google Analytics Universal Analytics (UA) using Google Tag Manager. Your Current Setup Dual-tagging Wait, dual-tag? The Google Tage Manage DataLayer Explained. Anyone looking to expand the depth of their web analytic collection using Google Tag Manager has more than likely come across detailed technical implementation documents singing praise and touting that anyone who’s anyone is leveraging this awesome functionality. I myself have sung its praises in my CPTA speaking engagement adventures and to clients. The general vibe I get is that people know they should be using it, but no one seems to know how, or more importantly why.
What is it – an analogy First and foremost, let’s start with an analogy to explain what exactly a data layer is. I want you to imagine you’re in charge of a restaurant, which is your website. Like any other restaurant you have customers, or visitors, that come in and order food off the menu. Each plate of food represents a page on your website. Why it’s cool If you were to use a datalayer outside of GTM, you would have to manually build out that functionality to your site.
Why you should care. Tips when setting up Google Analytics in Google Tag Manager. This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on Google Tag Manager. Read Part 1. What is a Container Tag? , Part 2. Google Tag Manager Series: 2. An Overview and Google Tag Manager Series: 3. How to organise a Google Tag Manager Implementation. At iProspect, we have been using multiple vendors for container tags since 2010. Setting up Google Analytics in Google Tag Manager is a fairly simple process. When transferring tags from being hard coded on the site to being held within Google Tag Manager, it can be a little trickier to setup some features that are not available, ‘out-of-the-box’. All information was accurate at the time of writing, however, may be likely to change with updates to Google Tag Manager. Site level and Roll-Up Reports Roll up reporting is not currently a standard feature in Google Analytics. When placing Google Analytics directly on the site, this was done through combining the two accounts or properties together into one code.
An example of a site and roll up tag. All About Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager, also known as GTM, is a free container tag system from Google. A container tag helps you manage different kinds of tags that you may have on your site. This include web analytics tags, advertising conversion tags, general JavaScript, etc. Some of you may have one or two tags on your site. Others may have 20 or more tags on your site. Everyone can use GTM to make tagging and tag changes easier. With Google Tag Manager you place a single line of JavaScript code on your site. This is called the container. Then you use the GTM interface to populate the container with other types of tags. Let’s take a closer look at Google Tag Manager and some of the important features.
Google Tag Manager Account Structure When you sign up for Google Tag Manager you get an account. A container is basically a holder, or bucket, that you can populate with all of your other tags. A container can be put on one website, or on multiple websites. The Container The Data Layer Macros Events Rules. Auto event tracking with Google Tag Manager. Implementing analytics, or any type of conversion tracking, is a big pain in the ass. There, I said it! But it’s been getting easier and easier with adoption of Tag Management tools.
Google Tag Manager is going to make it even easier with the introduction of a new feature called Auto Event Tracking. Auto Event Tracking let’s you track almost any user action without any additional JavaScript. TL;DR: watch this video. For all you Google Analytics users, this means that it is no longer necessary to add JavaScript to track PDF downloads, outbound links or other user clicks. I know – it’s exciting! There are a number of new additions to GTM that make auto-event tracking possible. How Auto-Event tracking works Here’s a brief overview of how the new auto-event tracking works. Listen, Capture Collect. 1. 2. 3. Remember, this all happens without any additional coding. There are three new pieces of functionality that make this possible: 1. 2. 3. The Event Listener Tag & Automatic Events.
Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager - Web Marketing Blog. Macro Guide For Google Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager Auto Event Tracking. If you pay attention to developments in Google Analytics, you were probably glued to the live stream of the Google Analytics Summit opening presentations. GA made a number of announcements about forthcoming features.
One of the most exciting is about automatically tracking events in Google Tag Manager. It’s a feature that’s been highly requested ever since Tag Manager was released, and it’s especially exciting because it’s available NOW (unlike a number of the other announcements, which are only “coming soon” — such as a forthcoming SLA for Tag Manager for Google Analytics Premium customers). But, if you go and take a look at Tag Manager trying to figure these out, you might find yourself scratching your head over documentation that is mostly “coming soon”. Not to worry: I’ve banged on the pipes, and here’s a guide to how it all works. First: The Problem But telling you you’ll never have to touch your website’s code again might be a bit of a stretch. Event Listeners in Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager - Inspecting and Configuring Auto Event Tracking. At the Google Analytics Summit 2013, Google announced that Google Tag Manager can now track event automatically. Whoop, my work here is done! This has been probably the largest feature push out to Google Tag Managers since GTM itself, so I to advance your understanding of Google Tag Managers auto event tracking, and provide you with a few tips on how you can navigate the GTM dataLayer. If you’re new to Google Tag Manager, specifically Auto Event Tracking, Justin Cutroni published an excellent article titled “Bye Bye JavaScript! Auto Event Tracking with Google Tag Manager“. It’s a grand article and all; however, I was a bit taken back by the title as for a lot of Google Tag Manager implementations, especially as an agency, using JavaScript either via the Custom HTML tag or using a Custom JavaScript macro will still be apart of our implementations.
Inspecting the dataLayer You’ll see that four objects are return. Setting up an Event using Auto Event Tracking 4) Click Save. Conclusion. Fun With Google Tag Manager: Part 1. Some Awesome Google Tag Manager Resources. One Goal, Many Values: Lookup Tables in Google Tag Manager. Google Analytics Events + GTM Lookup Tables = Super Groovy Goal Values! Here’s a familiar refrain: Need KPIs? Assign goal values to your non-ecommerce goals in Google Analytics – for example, calculate the average value of a lead and enter that as the goal value. And a less-familiar verse: Should you settle for the average value? Not if the actual values vary widely. Distributions matter! Suppose you have one lead form for many types of leads. New verse: You don’t have to give them all the same goal value. Send different event values to Google Analytics for each type of lead with a lookup table in Google Tag Manager. You say your goal is based on the thank-you page URL and not an event?
Follow these four steps to add more meaningful values and make your goal data rock. Step 1: Create the lookup table in Google Tag Manager Start making a list of lead types and their corresponding values. The usual method: What percentage of each type of lead turns into a sale? Here’s a much shorter example. How to Test Universal Analytics Before Upgrading: via Google Tag Manager |analytics for fun. Since Universal Analytics came out of beta last April, more and more users have been starting the upgrade process from classic Google Analytics. Altough Google strongly encourages to do the upgrade, and reassure that the migration will not cause any loss of data (perhaps just a few seconds of traffic), some of us still remain a bit worried about the change. This is especially true in the case of big websites with a large number of tags already implemented through classic Google Analytics.
Will there be any significant difference in data after the complete migration? Will Universal Analytics inflate/reduce some metrics compared to classing tracking code? These questions should motivate you to perform some testing before moving completely to a new standard. In this post I am going to suggest a step by step process to conduct your upgrade to Universal Analytics, with the help of Google Tag Manager. Yes, this post is also about Google Tag Manager. How can be that possible? 5a. 5b. Great! Google Tag Manager Readiness Checklist: 42 Ways to Prepare. Tracking Clicks Using Custom Data Attributes, Google Tag Manager, and Google Analytics. Controlling Tag Firing Order inside Google Tag Manager. Getting To Grips With Google Tag Manager. Node Relationships And GTM. Google Tag Manager Cheat Sheet: Tags and Macros. Add Optimizely with Universal Analytics via Tag Manager - SwellPath. Google Tag Manager Events using HTML5 data attributes.
How to Use the Google Tag Manager to Improve Your SEO | SEJ. Google Tag Manager Events using HTML5 data attributes. How to Use the Google Tag Manager to Improve Your SEO | SEJ. Your website desperately needs a Data Layer and you didn't even know it. Blog | MarketLytics. Google Tag Manager Best Practices. Google Tag Manager.