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Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Server-side Tagging and Privacy

301 posts on Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Server-side Tagging and Privacy

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Three Small Recent GA/GTM Improvements

Google are always making small unannounced tweaks and improvements to their products—here are a few of the more noteworthy ones we've spotted recently! Scroll Depth Tracking I gave out at length last year about the fact that you can't specify the trigger conditions for the listener dropping on the scroll depth trigger—meaning the page length couldn't be calculated accurately and causing scroll depth events to fire early. I suggested that they might want to let you select the listener conditio

Adam Englebright-

How to use BigQuery without GA360: insights from Measurefest 2019

Speaking at Measurefest For the first time in a few years, I took to the stage at Measurefest to talk about how to get your data from Google Analytics into BigQuery, and what you can do with it when you get there. Affordable BigQuery solutions Obviously, Analytics 360 can do this, but it costs $$$ per year. I outlined some more affordable methods, including third-party connector solutions, and provided a detailed example of how we would use our own Pipelines solution and what we could achiev

Adam Englebright-

Next‑Generation measurement with Google Analytics 4

Why GA4 has us excited This announcement has us rather excited at Measurelab. It has been a long time coming and represents the beginning of a completely new shift in how we use and think about digital measurement with Google Analytics. Leaving the old pageview model behind What we are effectively looking at here is a move away from Google Analytics as we know it, which inherited its underlying data collection schema and methods from Urchin Analytics; the analytics software product Google bo

Mark Rochefort-

GTM iframe tracking – Solutions Corner #2

This is part 2 of a semi-regular series, dedicated to reusable GTM solutions for scenarios or issues we've encountered more than once. Last time we looked at how to fire Google Analytics event to keep track of your Google Optimize experiments in GA, and this time we're looking at tracking clicks on iframes. We have encountered, several times, the situation of a client wanting to track clicks on an iframe. While we can't do much about interactions with stuff within the iframe without having GTM a

Adam Englebright-

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking with Adobe DTM

Here at Measurelab, we work predominantly with the Google stack but that doesn't stop us using other tools. As there's not much documentation available in the public forum on how to implement Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics using Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM) formerly know as Satellite, I think this blog post would be useful. As good introduction to the tools itself, below there’s a useful overview of Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Management architecture, which is from their learning resource pa

Alex Cirstea-

What is a Data Strategy and do I need one?

Let’s assume you’ve been using Google Analytics in your organisation for some time and your digital marketing endeavours at least are data-driven. More and more people are starting to see the benefit in using data to get their jobs done and now everyone’s talking about Data Science or Big Data or whatever. To be clear - when we say “data” we are not talking about just Google Analytics but the proliferation of this tool means that it is very likely a starting point for your data analytics. Alongs

Mark Rochefort-

Overcoming the limitations of Google Analytics

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager are used by around 30 to 50 million companies worldwide. The tools are great for basic web analytics but restrict the user to aggregated data unless a substantial fee is paid (reported to be £90K per annum). This presents a large obstacle for small to medium sized businesses who want to develop a data-driven strategy. Let’s imagine a small retailer wants to implement a recommendation engine. Not a bad idea given that Amazon estimates that around 35% of sal

David Kane-

GTM event tracking best practices – Solutions Corner #1

This is part 1 of what I hope will become a semi-frequent series on here, dedicated to reusable GTM solutions for scenarios or issues we've encountered more than once. This particular entry is a companion to Mark's piece from a couple of years back, but for Google Optimize rather that Optimizely. In short, it sends data layer pushes so you can fire Google Analytics events when there are Optimize experiments running, which saves you from using custom dimension slots etc in the course of ordinary

Adam Englebright-

Goodbye DoubleClick, hello Google Marketing Platform!

Last week, Google announced they were unifying their analytics and advertising platforms under a single new name: Google Marketing Platform. The Google Analytics 360 Suite and DoubleClick brands are being replaced with this single name. What does this mean for DoubleClick? If anything this is a change that has needed to happen for years. DoubleClick always sat rather clumsily alongside other tools from Google and this shift heralds the beginning of a more unified approach. Search Ads 360 wil

Mark Rochefort-

Adding Firebase Analytics to your React Native app

<span style="font-weight: 400;">This article describes how to integrate Google Analytics for Firebase (formerly Firebase Analytics) to a React Native app. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">In order to do this, you need to use a JavaScript bridge called </span><a href="https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RNFirebase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. &nbsp;</span> This is lightweight layer sitting on top of native Firebase librarie

Alex Cirstea-

Firebase Analytics demystified

<span style="font-weight: 400;">After a steep learning curve into the world of Firebase Analytics or Google Analytics for Firebase, it seems that a blog post about it would be much valued and appreciated. I’ve compiled a list of the most frequently asked questions.</span> 1. How does Firebase Analytics define a session? Firebase Analytics defines a session as a user engaging with your app for a minimum amount of time (10 seconds by default) followed by your user not engaging with your app

Alex Cirstea-

The Problem With Google Tag Manager Triggers: Those Shiny New Built-In Options (And a Possible Solution)

Hey folks. The shiny new Built-In Triggers for things we used to have to use big old Custom HTML tags to track before—Youtube tracking! Scroll depth! Element visibility!—have had a bit of time to bed in now. We had a look at changing over to the new built-in solutions everywhere we were using Custom HTML—if it's being done by Tag Manager itself, it has to be better, right? Right? Wrong. This issue is related to a fact that I've discovered through experience but not seen actually documented exc

Adam Englebright-

Activist analytics: using digital analytics to drive change

Hey folks, Adam here. I had quite a busy weekend last week - one that has now been documented in the national press! - and thought I'd share some thoughts about it on here. My journey into activist analytics I've been a member of the Labour Party and the related grassroots movement Momentum for several years now, but beyond a bit of leafleting here and there social anxiety has kept me away from the phonebanking, street stands and doorknocking that lie at the heart of party political activity.

Adam Englebright-

Free Google Analytics Health Check Template by Measurelab

Hey Folks, It's been a while since the last time I wrote anything on the blog so I thought I'd make it up to you with a little freebie. Why GA health checks are important One of the most common tasks at Measurelab (and I'm sure in many other analytics agencies) is to run a "health check" of the main features and configurations of the Google Analytics user interface. How the template works This varies in depth and level of detail depending on various factors but we do find it quite helpful

Juan Barros-

Google Data Studio tips: tricks and best practices

Getting started with Google Data Studio Since its release back in May 2016, Data Studio (a free version of Data Studio 360) has made quite a lot of progress on improving its functionality. Of course, it is still in beta, so you might come across some system bugs and limitations, but the Google team is working hard to add new features and fix any issues the user may face, with at least two new releases per month (so far). I won't go into details as what you can do with the tool, as you can chec

Magdalena Pajak-

When GA just isn't enough - my #measurefest talk

<span style="font-weight: 400;">I spoke at <a href="http://www.measurefest.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">#Measurefest</a> in the Barbican last Friday. Here are the slides from my talk but I wanted to write a quick summary to give a bit more context as the slides on their own don’t tell the story. </span> When GA just isn't enough from darafitzgerald The title of the talk was "When GA just isn't enough". For some that know me this might sound like an unexpected title. I sp

Dara Fitzgerald-

How to integrate Optimizely with GTM & Universal Analytics

If you want to integrate your Optimizely experiment and variation data with Google’s Universal Analytics via Google Tag Manager, you will soon see that the official documentation assumes a custom‑coded implementation. It then instructs you to edit your GA pageview tag directly. If you are using Google Tag Manager, then you obviously will not want to follow this guidance as you probably have the Google Analytics pageview tag in a tag template. It is always advisable to keep custom JavaScript an

Steven Elliott-

Understanding GA non-interactive events: month 1 insights

Starting a new adventure in analytics When I first decided to quit my ohh-so-lucrative job in the investment banking, most of my friends and family thought I was going bonkers! Neither were they impressed with my idea to start a new career in Web Analytics, working for some small start-up based in Lewes (wait why exactly do you want to work in Loos?!?). I must say that I had my doubts as well - will I be able to adapt to a totally new working environment? Will I ever learn what all the cookies,

Magdalena Pajak-