In this post, I’m going to walk you through an overview of the Google Analytics for Firebase platform, including an overview of the out of the box reports you get with the Firebase SDK. What: Google Analytics for Firebase is the latest mobile analytics tracking platform from Google. This is meant as the next generation of mobile app tracking, taking the place of the Google Analytics Services SDK (this SDK is still supported in maintenance mode but is not being built on). Why: The Google Analytics Services SDK was built off of the web analytics model of Google Analytics. Google Analytics for Firebase (GA4F) was built from the ground up as an app-centric analytics platform, enabling it to track app type actions in a much more intuitive way When: Firebase Analytics
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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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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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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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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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Designing a new website is a big task. You must take many things into consideration: ease of use & functionality, mobile responsiveness, content, flow, graphics, etc. On top of that, you need to ensure that all of the analytics tracking is properly setup and collecting the necessary data for you to report on success. With so many considerations, it’s important to look at what your users are already telling you about it’s ease of use and helpfulness before you begin to make decisions about how to redesign and change it. Key metrics to consider when thinking about a website redesign: – number of unique users & sessions in a given time period – top content by pageviews/events/goal conversions/etc – funnel success (newsletter signups, contact form submits, checkouts, etc) – device
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“Ultimately, data collection boils down to a simple thing: gathering meaningful data. What meaningful means is something that must be negotiated uniquely for each business case, each project, each product, each organization, and each platform.” Whenever I think about this quote by my friend Simo Ahava (who has a blog chock full of wonderful content), my thoughts immediately drift to Custom Dimensions. What are Custom Dimensions? Custom Dimensions, as you may have guessed based upon the name, are simply custom ways to collect data for use in Google Analytics. By analyzing meaningful data stored in Custom Dimensions we are able to understand more about user behavior on our sites, which will guide business actions. The more we know about the user and their behavior, the more informed our decisions will be. One
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Of all of the reporting features that Google Analytics has launched in the past few years, I think this is, quite possibly, my favorite. Not just because it’s new and pretty, but because it fills a big big need for analysts: Define steps based on any dimension criteria. This means you can build funnels on the fly based on events, page views, etc. You are no longer limited to just using a destination/page URL as a funnel step as you are in regular GA goals. My favorite use case is sending any kind of hit type from an offline system, such as a CRM, to GA via the Measurement Protocol and then adding those as steps into a Custom Funnel (see the below example) They are RETROACTIVE!!!! You can build
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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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