On the last #tip we talked about how to debug/qa our data attributes , and now we're going to learn about how to natively track events/social interactions within Google Tag Manager . We're going to learn it, basing our tracking on Google Analytics Events and Social Interactions. Of course this can be expanded to any other tool just changing the data attributes, but hey, this is about to learning not about give me a copy and paste solution.…

Some months ago I asked some friends to test a new tool I was working on and past week I released something close to an open alpha, today after pulling some details, a new UI redesign 100% mobile compatible. I'm announcing the GAUPET release. At first I named it as GA Governance Tool, but after some interesting chat with the "osom" Yehoshua Coren . I(we)'ve decided to change the tool's name to something that it's closer to what it…

With the years I learned that using CSS selectors to track user actions is really great but sadly I learned too that it's really dangerous too. It's true that we won't need to ask the IT team to add some dataLayer or ga pushes into the page, and therefore saving a lot of precious time, but in the other side, any single page update or testing will break our tracking. Now I try to use data attributes whereas is possible, since those are more likely…

I've been thinking about doing a Google Analytics related hackaton for a long time. Some months ago, I started to take a look about how Universal Analytics Plugins work and I decided that coding a plugin to all the data to a secondary property using just a plugin would be a real nice example. For years now, I've sharing a lot of code that I've worked on, some tracking ideas too, but still I don't consider myself a developer, if i must say it, I really…

In JavaScript when you want to copy an object into another variable is not an easy as doing var myVar = myObjectVar; and you should be really careful when working with your dataLayer info in your customHtml Tags and your Custom Javascript Variables. Let's try to explain this is the best way I can. When  you're doing that you're not copying the current object data to a new variable but instead you're pointing your new variable…

This time I'm writting down some tips for when you guys are playing around with the custom HTML tags or custom JavaScript variables not only for Google Tag Manager, but for any other TMS or website. Most times due the projects deadlines or maybe just lazyness, the code we use (I include myself here), is not fail proof, and we need to think that we may broke some page functionality or even some page load. So using customHTML/custom JavaScript is a…

In Google Analytics the urls are case sensitive, therefore in our content reports /index.html will be different to /Index.html, and querystring values will make Google Analytics to think that even if it's the same page it will recorded as a new one, /index.html?cache=off and /index.html?cache=on will be recorded as 2 different pageviews for example. The first problem its easily fixable with a lowercase filter within the views, but…

In the past years, I worked on implementing Google Analytlics and Google Tag Manager in a lot of differences scenearios and almost any kind of integrations. So I'm gonna show you some code snippets that may help you integrating Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics into your libraries in the best way possible. Checking is Universal Analytics is available Most integrations I've seen does check for the ga object within the DOM before trying…

Google Tag Manager does not throw any error when the code in a variable fails. This is not bad per se as it would save us from having our sites failing if something is not coded as it should, but it will blind us agains some minor errors that may not be noticiables, for example if our Enhanced Ecommerce is failing for a certain product, or from some specific browser. Thanksfully we can use try{}catch(e){} to capture those errors :). And we could…

In my previous post I've talked about how to manage to use the native Optimizely tracking when using Google Tag Manager . Now we're going further and we'll learn how to track the experiment that are based on redirects in the best way possible. So, firstly you'll need to enable the Optimizely and Google Analytics integration. Now here is the tricky part. If we're sending users to an experiment page that it's based on a redirect we'll be likely…