Better data enables better decision making, and it begins with how you track it – to provide more context to what’s already out there. Because by knowing more about the context, you’ll be better equipped and informed. When I’m interviewing prospective interns or senior roles for our marketing team and we get to questions about their knowledge of Google Analytics, I always ask them two questions to get a sense of their proficiency level: Have you worked with Advanced Segments Do you know how to use Event Tracking and can you explain how it works? To me, both are essential for getting a better sense of the data and the users on your site. With this post I’d like to explain the importance of Event Tracking and how we use
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Many, many websites have forms on them: Subscription forms, Contact forms, Sign-up forms, etc. Understanding how users to your site or app interact with your form, and how they are succeeding through the form, or dropping out of the form, is an important key performance indicator (KPI) for your business to track. There are a lot of tools out there that have a specific purpose for form field tracking, but why use a separate tool when you can do it well with one you are already using? Using Google Analytics Event Tracking is a great way to track form field interaction on your sites and to create fallout funnels to understand success or lack there of for your forms. The benefit of using a tool you already have is data
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In my last post, I showed you how to set up the Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration tag in GTM. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up the next piece of the puzzle, the Google Analytics: GA4 Event tag. You’ll use this tag to set up all of your recommended and custom events that don’t come out of the box with Enhanced Measurement (more info on that here). Step 1: Select “Google Analytics: GA4 Event” from the new tag configuration pane After you’ve successfully set up your “Google Analytics: GA4 Configuration” tag (see this post for step by step directions), the next thing to do is to set up your first “Google Analytics: GA4 Event” tag. To do so, select “New Tag” and choose from a couple
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Following up on last week’s post on event tracking, I thought it would be a good idea to deep dive on outbound link tracking. Outbound link tracking is super easy to setup using Google Tag Manager and the insights you can gain by understanding the most common paths to leaving your website are definitely worth the minimal effort to implement. So, without further ado, here is a step by step guide to setting up outbound link tracking via Google Tag Manager. Before you being, be sure you’ve enabled the necessary pre-defined variables in Google Tag Manager. Step 1: Create a new tag in Google Tag Manger. – Select ‘Google Analytics’ as the tag and Universal Analytics as the tag type – Choose ‘Click’ for what triggers the tag to fire
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If you are looking to understand the actions that a user takes on your website, one of the best ways to do this is with event tracking. This can include (but not limited to): Link clicks (on site or outbound) Downloads (whitepaper, pdf, etc) Scrolling Load times In Google Analytics, event tracking is made up of 4 elements: Category, Action, Label, and Value. The awesome thing about this is that the hierarchy use cases are highly customizable so events are a very flexible way to report on user action. For larger websites/enterprises, I tend to track events in the following format, utilizing the category as a means of organizing actions based on site structure. Note that the ‘Value’ field is used to set a numerical value for an event, most
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Are you setting up a GA4 property for the first time? Here are my top 10 must-haves for getting your new GA4 property up and running fast and with settings organized to help you make the most of your analytics data! Follow these tips and you’ll be well on your way to having a best practice GA4 set up. The first 3 tips are focused on getting your GA4 property enabled and collecting data, and the following 7 focus on ensuring you have a well-organized and robust GA4 property set up. Creating a GA4 property and collecting data 1/ Create a Google Analytics 4 property This first step is actually really easy. You’ll go to GA, create a new property, and the default will be a new GA4 property. Go
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Following Krista’s excellent post on using secondary dimensions in Google Analytics, this post will explain the GA represents your data using its internal data model and why it’s important to understand this. You’ll see that certain combinations of metrics and dimensions don’t mean what you might think, and that some are actually completely invalid. We’ll cover examples of secondary dimensions and custom reports where seemingly sensible reports are invalid and how to spot and avoid these mistakes. Introduction We see the world through our eyes, we smell the world through our nose, we taste it in our mouths and we feel it in our finger-tips. We perceive the world using the same senses but, philosophically we have unique, individual perspectives when we think about the world and what it means
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Towards the end of last year, I heard feedback from a few of our clients that there wasn’t a lot of good documentation on how to implement Google Analytics via Google Tag Manager. I felt this pain because I’d been in their shoes. For the previous couple of years I’d been on the practitioner side implementing GA via GTM and I knew exactly what they meant. So I decided to write a guide on how to implement a lot of common GA features via GTM from a practitioner viewpoint. I wanted to be sure to call out the gotchas and best practices that I’ve learned from good, ol’ fashion experience of doing this stuff myself. So today I’m really excited to share with you what I’ve been working on. We just
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Working as a practitioner in-house at a technology company, one of my jobs is to teach my team members how to fish with Google Analytics. What should they be looking for in GA? Where do they start? What is meaningful? Are the campaigns being measured? Are the microsites tagged? These are the types of questions I get everyday, and very likely, you do too. In this guest post, I detail how I teach my internal practitioners to use the following 3 features: 1. Event Tracking 2. Advanced Segments 3. Shortcuts Visit the official Google Analytics Blog to see the full post!
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