Using Event Tagging for Form Field Tracking

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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Step-by-Step: New Element Visibility Trigger

As I mentioned in my post on the New Scroll Tracking Trigger, Google Tag Manager has just launched 2 new, exciting triggers. The second of those is one called ‘Element Visibility’. Depending on your use cases, this is likely even more exciting than Scroll Tracking (although I’d say that one was pretty damn exciting considering countless people have spent hours upon hours come up with technical solutions, blogging, and speaking about something as simple (in concept) as Scroll Tracking). With Element Visibility, you can now trigger a tag to fire based on an element on your site being in the viewport. You can specify the percentage of pixels that must be in the viewport (ex. 50% of the element’s pixels must be visible to count, a standard in viewability today),
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Step-by-Step: New Scroll Depth Trigger in Google Tag Manager

How far down my page did users go? Did they actually see the content below the fold? <— Said every executive ever to every analyst ever Scroll depth tracking has always been somewhat of a pain to setup in Google Analytics. Sure, there are guides like this one from Justin Cutroni, and there are WordPress plugins, but let’s be honest, until now, there haven’t been any good solutions to easily do this in Google Analytics. It’s required a ton of code and a developer to implement. Until now being the important words in that sentence… Google Tag Manager has just released a few new triggers, one of which is called “Scroll Depth” (and I can’t be more excited!!). This trigger allows you to easily setup a tag to track the
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Step by Step: Using GTM Workspaces

There are many use cases you may want to explore for GTM Workspaces (see the HC article here), but I wanted to take the opportunity to run you through a simple one: I have some edits in progress in my container that I’m not ready to publish, but I need to launch a new tag to add the Optimize code snippet to my website. This is a perfect use case for using a Workspace in Google Tag Manager. Step 1: Create a new Workspace To create a new workspace, on the left hand nav, click into the place that says ‘Default Workspace’. This will open a slider showing your current workspaces, and on the top right hand side there is a blue plus arrow. Clicking it will open an additional
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Step-by-Step: Linking Your Google Analytics and Optimize Accounts and Installing the Optimize Snippet

To begin using Optimize, you must first setup your account and container (see this post with a Step-by-Step of how to do that), and then link your Google Analytics property to your Optimize account. In this post, I’ll show you how to setup your linking. Step 1: After logging into optimize.google.com, and after having setup your account and container, you should see something like the below container, ready for you to create your first experiment. Before we do that, however, I’d recommend linking your Google Analytics property first (note: you can do this in any order, but to launch an experiment you must have a linked GA property, and the Optimize snippet on your page, so I like to do these steps first). On the right hand nav bard, on step number 2,
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Step-by-Step: QA Your GTM Container with Preview and Debug Mode

Previously, I’ve showed you how to implement a basic Google Analytics page view tag, event tags, and outbound link tracking using Google Tag Manager. An important step prior to publishing any tag in GTM is to QA the tag prior to publishing. You can do this with the ‘Preview and Debug’ mode in GTM. This functionality can help ensure that your tags are firing correctly, as well as highlight any potential discrepancies in the tag setup prior to publishing to your production environment. This is a quick process that you can accomplish in just a few steps: Step 1: Setup your tag. In this case, I’m testing a new pageview tag called ‘gaPageview Test’ on this blog, kristaseiden.com. You can see the tag and trigger setup here: Step 2: Once you’ve completed the tag you’re working on, you’ll want to go into the ‘Preview and Debug’ mode via the button in the upper left hand corner of the
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How to Improve Engagement Tracking with Event Tracking

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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GTM Analytics Academy Course Open Till July 24th!

I’m INCREDIBLY excited that we launched our newest Analytics Academy course last week (June 23rd). This course is all about Google Tag Manager and is aimed at helping marketers, analysts, and developers quickly get up to speed on GTM, tagging best practices, and using tag management to improve your analytics (and other tags) implementation. And I’m INCREDIBLY excited that I have the opportunity to be the instructor for our newest course! This opportunity allows me to bring my passion for teaching GTM to both a technical and a less technical audience and to help GTM education reach the masses. I couldn’t be more excited! If you’re not familiar with the Analytics Academy, here’s the quick history and relevant links: there are currently 5 courses: Digital Analytics Fundamentals, Platform Principles, Ecommerce
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Step by Step: Adding a Second GA Property via Google Tag Manager

Placing more than one analytics property ID on your website can be very beneficial. This gives you the ability to send analytics data to more than one property in Google Analytics and can be used to analyze different segments of traffic, control access for different groups of stakeholders, link additional features to a particular property, and many many more reasons. Each business will have their own reasoning for sending data to multiple properties – what’s yours? Leave your reasons in the comments section, I’d love to hear! The days of double tagging a website via code on your page are gone… Well, not really, you can still do it, but I wouldn’t recommend it. In fact, it’s never been a highly recommended practice for a many reasons, here are a couple: Multiple instances of
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