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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Marketing Campaign Attribution – Take 2

It’s been 3+ years since I wrote my original blog post (https://www.kristaseiden.com/guide-ga-tracking-for-marketing-campaigns/) on campaign tracking, but it’s one that has aged well. I still point people to this post when they ask me for more info on best practices for setting up UTM tracking (or campaign tracking) because for the most part, things haven’t changed. I still recommend the below hierarchy for manual tagging of campaigns, using the (up to) 5 UTM parameter slots available to you in the URL: Campaign -name of your overarching campaign – e.g. spring-2013-collection or summer-2013-announcements. Be sure to follow a consistent campaign naming structure. Medium – the medium used to send your campaign. Include “email” for an email campaign, “cpc” for ads, “social” for a social network or “landing-page” if you’re tracking button clicks from a landing
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Personalizing with Google Analytics Audiences in Optimize 360

As analysts, we know a decent amount about our online customers, because we can see their online behavior. We know where they came from (geographically or traffic source), what they are looking at or clicking on our website, and whether or not they’ve completed our goals or KPIs (such as going through a checkout process and purchasing a product). With analytics, we are able to slice and dice our data to separate our customers based on their actions, demographics, and interests, and yet, most of the time, we are still serving them the exact same website experience. When asked, one of the common reasons I’ve heard this to be true is that it’s really hard to get data from an analytics tool to an optimization tool, and vice versa from
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The Education Series: Advocacy

I’ve written advocacy into my past three job descriptions. In fact, as an Analytics Advocate, it was my job. So what is advocacy and how can you get started with it? I’m sure there are many definitions of what advocacy can mean, but to me, it means this: Being present in market (via blogs, social media, conferences, etc) to share your best practices, thoughts and experiences on behalf of a practice, product, or field. Further, I think there is a responsibility built into advocacy to educate others about the topic you are advocating for, not just preach to them. I’ve spent the last 5+ years of my career advocating for data, analytics, and optimization best practices. At times, this was a “20% project” for me where I had a negotiated
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5 Tips to Getting More out of Google Optimize

Martijn Scheijbeler and I recently presented at MeasureCamp London (and he again at MeasureCamp Amsterdam) on our best practices and tips for getting more out of Google Optimize. The response was great, so we decided to pen these thoughts as a blog post to share more broadly.   Tip #1: Identify key segments of users to target  (Krista) One of the things that makes Optimize so powerful is it’s deep integration with Google Analytics. You can use your Google Analytics data to identify key segments of users to target users as audiences shared Optimize. Examples: Loyal customers: Been to your site X times and purchased Y instances/value Status groups: Premium frequent fliers, Economy standard fliers Geo-location: Special offer for San Antonio residents Once you’ve identified these key audiences, create a unique
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The Education Series: 5 Tips for Becoming a Public Speaker

This post is part of the Education Series, a series focused on learnings and tips for the softer skills of digital marketing, many of which come from my experiences over the past decade in this industry.    One of my first (large) public speaking engagements was in front of a crowd of about 300 young adults at a political networking event in Washington D.C. in the summer of 2007. I was running the event and was the Emcee + speaker for organization background and event purpose, prior to introducing our keynote for the evening (a US Congresswoman). My voice quivered uncontrollably, I turned bright red and felt faint as I stumbled my way through. Friends in the audience promised I didn’t sound nervous, but I never believed them. After a second
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The Education Series: Introduction

I’ve spent the past 2.5 years as Google’s Analytics Advocate (and unofficially filled part of this role for 2 years prior to that) focused on advocacy for our GA360 Suite products, including (but not limited to) product design, user feedback, training, troubleshooting, and education. This role has stretched my mind (and at times, my patience), given me the opportunity to engage with and learn from users all over the world, forced me to become a better writer, and provided opportunities to grown and scale Analytics Education more than I could have ever imagined. Breaking it down by a few stats of my time in this role, it *roughly* looks like this: ~100 speaking engagements & webinars, many of which were large conference keynotes all over the world 80-100 client and agency meetings 30 livestream/hangout
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Women in Analytics: Finding Allies

This past weekend I had the pleasure of participating in my first MeasureCamp event. This was actually my first un-conference, and even though I had a vague idea of how the day would go, I had no idea what to expect when it came to running a session. I had heard many things about strategizing to pick the best session slots (and avoiding the time slot Simo chooses), room layout, etc. Thankfully, MeasureCamp founder Peter O’Neill recommended a specific room to me after I described the setup/style I was after. I was also not sure which time slot to book, but I ended up grabbing session #3 which was right before lunch. I figured that this could either be a blessing or a curse, depending on how hungry people were.
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