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How to Use Exploration Reports in Google Analytics 4

7Feb

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Google Tag Manager

How to Use Exploration Reports in Google Analytics 4

Compared to Universal Analytics, Google Analytics is missing a lot of predefined reports that we are familiar with (e.g. landing page, site search, etc.). I don’t know if this will change in the future, but I hope so! In the meantime, we got a pretty powerful suite of reporting capabilities called Analysis Hub. It’s the place where you can do ad-hoc analysis and dig deeper into your data. In today’s blog post, I wanted to focus on one particular part of it, Exploration Reports in Google Analytics 4. Table of contents Main components Variables Segments Dimensions and metrics Tab settings Segment comparisons Rows Columns Values Filters The Output (report) Examples of Exploration reports Landing pages report Order coupon code report Additional things ...

10Jan

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Google Tag Manager

Track Clicks with Google Analytics 4 and GTM

If you are just starting to get a grip on Google Tag Manager, click tracking is probably one of the most demanded things you want to implement. There are many clickable elements on your website and you want to understand how website visitors are interacting with them. In this blog post, we will take a look at how to track clicks with Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager. First, we will look at some automatic click-tracking capabilities in GA4, and then we will extend the list of tracked events with help of GTM. By the way, if you are completely new (or just starting) with Google Analytics 4, download my free e-book below. Ready? Let’s get started. Table of contents + Hide table of contents + Why track clicks? Automatic click tracking in GA4 (Enhanced Measurement) Track...

A Guide to Custom Dimensions in Google Analytics 4

14Dec

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Google Tag Manager

A Guide to Custom Dimensions in Google Analytics 4

The thing with Google Analytics (or any other similar tool) is that it won’t help you much if you use it just “out of the box”. I’m talking about the classic “just add one line of JavaScript to your site and start tracking”. If you want to benefit from a platform, you have to customize your data collection. Every business is unique and you might want to track different things in order to understand how different parts are performing. And one of the ways how you can customize it is custom dimensions. Instead of just having some generic data, you can go really deep with your setup. Even though Google Analytics 4 offers better automatic tracking capabilities (compared to Universal Analytics), that’s not enough. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to configure Custom Dimensions in Google A...

5Oct

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Google Tag Manager

Track Logins and Signups with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics

If your website or ecommerce store has a login feature (for your visitors/customers), you should definitely measure that. Since the tool of choice on my blog is Google Analytics, I’ll show you several options on how to track logins with Google Tag Manager and send it to Google Analytics. Oh, and let’s not forget signups too! Instead of trying to write some compelling introduction that should get you hooked, let’s get down the business and learn how to implement a login tracking setup. Table of contents + Show table of contents + A quick word about the User ID feature in Google Analytics Why should you track logins and signups? There is no silver bullet: the login/signup tracking method depends on your site Method #1. Using popular CMS? Check for GTM plugins Method #2. Track w...

13Sep

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Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager and Multiple Domains: How to Configure?

So, you have probably landed on this article because you are working with multiple domains (e.g. domain1.com and domain2.com) and have some doubts on how to handle Google Tag Manager. Should you use one GTM container on all domains? Or should you use one container per domain? In this guide, I’ll show you how to handle Google Tag Manager on multiple domains. These tips apply to subdomains too. Google Tag Manager does not care about domains or subdomains As the subtitle of this chapter has already spoiled, GTM container does not care about how many domains you use it on. If you want, you can use the same container on 5 related websites (that are hosted on different domains or subdomains). Even though (most likely) this will cause you some headaches, there are no technical limitations. Wh...

13Sep

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Google Tag Manager

How and Where To Get Google Tag Manager Help?

Updated: August 3rd, 2020. (Although Simo Ahava has posted a blog post of this very same topic long before me, I feel like this needs to be addressed multiple times.) Stuck with Google Tag Manager? Relax, we’ve all been there. Not even once. Not even ten or twenty times. It’s not easy to master GTM and if you are determined to do that, many questions will definitely arise in the process. Luckily, there is a whole bunch of ways how you can get Google Tag Manager help and resolve your GTM issues. All options are listed in no particular order. Additionally, I’ll give you tips on how to be more cooperative and improve the process of getting a quicker GTM help. It’s a two-player game where both parties are equally responsible for solving issues. The Underrated Power of Google Search First,...

26Jul

By phpInfo2 Comments

Google Tag Manager

How to Reduce Direct Traffic in Google Analytics

Direct traffic in Google Analytics is often misunderstood. If you think that direct traffic is the one that enters your website’s address in the address bar or accesses it via bookmarks, I have some bad news. In reality, that is just a fraction of what direct traffic really is. The first reason for this confusion lies in the name itself. Direct. Is it really direct? In Google Analytics, direct traffic really means “I don’t know where that visitor came from”. It might be from the address bar, from bookmarks of your browser, from email, from chat/messengers, etc. It should be called “unknown” instead. But this rant is for another time. There are many reasons that affect this type of traffic and I wanted to address the ways how to reduce direct traffic in Google Analytics. Also, in the seco...

18Jun

By phpInfoNo Comments

Google Tag Manager

Extract a Price from a Page with Google Tag Manager

While DOM scraping is not recommended (because it’s quite fragile) in web tracking, sometimes you just have no other choice. Asking a developer to push a certain data point to the Data Layer is always the best practice but in some projects, you have just two options: try to fetch a certain value from the page by yourself or do nothing and continue without that particular data point In this blog post, I wanted to show you several little scripts that will help you fetch a price if it is a visible element on a page. This is not designed to fetch all of the prices on a page and build complex-ish objects, etc. Let’s take a step back. This blog post is for those situations where you want to work only with one price. Where can it be useful? Maybe you want to track an impression of a...

24Jan

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Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Assistant Tutorial

If you’ve ever used Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Tag Manager, or any other Google’s analytics/marketing tools, chances are that you’ve at least heard of Google Tag Assistant, or, most probably, even used it. That’s no surprise because it’s a really handy debugging tool! Even though many of Analytics Mania’s readers use this Chrome’s extension, the majority of them do not reach its full potential. But that’s about to change because, in this Google Tag Assistant Tutorial, I’ll give you a bunch of tips on how to make you + Google Tag Assistant = super team. Table of Contents What is Google Tag Assistant anyway? #1. How Does Google Tag Assistant Work? #2. Google Tag Assistant Colors #3. Session Recordings #4. Tag Assistant Report #5. Google Analytics Report #6. Repla...

24Jan

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Google Tag Manager

How To Implement GDPR Cookie Consent Notification with Google Tag Manager

On May 25th 2018, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came in effect, meaning that online businesses that get visitors from the European Union, must track visitor/user behavior and collect data more carefully, responsibly, and with consent. I will not go into details what GDPR is (there are other great blog posts out there like this one, this one or this one). Long story short, a standard This website uses cookies blah blah blah cookie consent becomes irrelevant. From now on, if you are using some tools/scripts on your website that are used to identify individuals and their data is processed by you or 3rd parties), that can be done only when a person gives consent. This also affects tracking codes that are managed in Google Tag Manager. So before you get the actual consent, all the...

Google Analytics Cross Domain Tracking with Google Tag Manager

24Jan

By phpInfoNo Comments

Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics Cross Domain Tracking with Google Tag Manager

There are already plenty of resources online that explain how to implement Google Analytics Cross-domain tracking. However, it feels that the questions of this topic are still one of the most popular ones in the community (source of this statement: my gut). And that’s no surprise. Sometimes people just blindly follow guides without properly understanding WHY this or that was made. In other cases, they do understand the basic principles but are not aware that their case/project has some nuances. That’s why I decided to also chime in, join this bandwagon and give my take on how to explain Google Analytics Cross-domain tracking with Google Tag Manager. Brace yourself, this guide will be a long one (but definitely rewarding). P.S. If you’re not sure whether you should use Google Tag Manager...

24Jan

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Google Tag Manager

Google Analytics Goals Not Working? Here’s How to Fix That

In today’s blog post, I will not rant about how important goals are in Google Analytics and that every GA setup MUST use them. If you landed on this blog post, chances are that you are already trying to implement them. Kudos for that! In Universal Analytics, sometimes goals are not working as expected. You configure and they just don’t work. Maybe a blog post you’ve read was misleading/outdated? Maybe you misunderstood a certain part of the tutorial? Maybe you’ve encountered a bug? So, if you’re now stuck and your Google Analytics goals are not working, let’s take a look at possible reasons why this happens (+ possible solutions). Table of Contents A quick refresher #1. Incorrect match-type #2. Incorrect Page Path #3. There is some random delay in RT reports after a goal is crea...

20Apr

By phpInfoNo Comments

Google Tag Manager

Why Google Analytics tag in GTM displayed as “still running”?

Over the course of the last several days, this issue became more popular than ever, therefore, I decided to write a quick blog post. So here’s the problem: you enable Google Tag Manager Preview and Debug mode and see that a certain (or maybe multiple) Universal Analytics tag is displayed as “still running”. You refresh the page but the tag is “still running”. You open your Google Analytics real-time reports to check whether the hit has reached its destination but no luck. The event (pageview or something else) was not received. So where’s the problem? I’m not sure about what are ALL the possible causes of this problem but I can definitely tell you the most common one. Check where you have inserted Google Analytics Settings Variable in your Universal Analytics tag. When you create a Un...

4Nov

By phpInfoNo Comments

Google Tag Manager

Undefined Variable in Google Tag Manager

In the middle of October 2018, Google Tag Manager silently introduced a new feature that caused some questions in the GTM community (including me), an Undefined variable. In this quick guide, I’ll shed some light on what an Undefined variable in Google Tag Manager is and where you can use it. First of all, you can find this variable among other User-defined variables in your GTM container: It is simple to configure. In fact, it has no settings at all (if we ignore the standard “Format Value” feature). And all this variable does is just return an undefined value. So why is it useful? The answer: you can use it in your GTM stack to keep the data cleaner. Let me explain. In September, GTM introduced Format Value option in variables’ settings that allows yo...