Real Time Analytics Monitoring with Google Sheets
Whether it's because you don't want your business to lose money or because you just like to watch videos on YouTube, automating your analytics monitoring can help you sit back and relax knowing that everything's under control. This time we'll look at how a simple Google Sheet can help you check your analytics on the fly with the Google Analytics Real Time Reporting API.
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Measuring with DataLayers, Data Attributes, Meta Tags and Webhooks: When to use what
When asking developers to add extra information to a site like a user ID, user login status, page category, or product price the conversation that ensues can be confusing. Do you want everything in a dataLayer push? Is it a data-attribute for the element on page? And how does that match with what your SEO colleague wants? Let's find out!
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Using Puppeteer to automate your google analytics testing
Testing your analytics setup regularly can help you prevent uncomfortable situations with your boss or client when there's been another change on the site and suddenly all your campaigns and goals have zero conversions. We will look at how to test the actual requests that are being sent to Google Analytics, Facebook, or any other place you have your tags pointed at.
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Analytics and tag testing with Cypress
One thing that's often overlooked in setting up your analytics is making sure it keeps working. When you add new tags or your developers deploy new versions it's easy to forget about your site tracking until the revenue in your ecommerce reports drops to zero. That's usually the point where accusations fly back and forth past the office chairs and the boardroom starts asking uncomfortable questions. So let's set up some tests for your analytics and tag management.
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Why you should stop using Google Analytics (as we know it)
Google Analytics has grown to be the most common means of tracking web behaviour since its launch in 2005. However, the tool itself hasn’t really been updated since the launch of its ‘Universal Analytics’ in 2012. That’s almost eight years ago, and eight years is a long time in the online world. Now might just be the right time to ditch the good, old Analytics and start using, yes, Google Analytics.
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8 ways to optimise Google Tag Manager (GTM) for speed and performance
Google Tag Manager makes it incredibly easy to add marketing tags to your site. From registering ads conversions and transactions to sophisticated tags that segment users based on the weather in their current location, you can go crazy without having to go back to your development team every time. But that doesn't mean you should do it all. While your dev and SEO teams are working hard to reach their pagespeed goals all the marketeers are having a proverbial party in their yard. Here you'll find a few tips to keep your GTM container lean and fast.
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GTM Custom Templates: how to think about building your own
Custom templates are a way to make tag management even more manageable, scalable and secure. GTM’s custom templates can seem very limited, since they’re built on a very restricted, sandboxed version of JavaScript. There's much potential in custom templates, but it helps to think about the fundamentals of tag management when you start building your own custom template. In this post I’ll show you my thinking behind a custom template for building a frequent-flyer style tag to track user behaviour as an attribute.
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ITP 2.1: Why you won’t make your advertising targets, but will finally understand how cookies work
Last February, Apple introduced version 2.1 of their so-called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) causing major impact on a number of fields: A/B testing, analytics, affiliate marketing, conversion tracking and most importantly remarketing. The short version is you won’t be able to target Safari users after seven days. The long version takes us back to the internet in the ‘90s and makes you rethink the results of your online ad spend.
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A Visual Leviathan: Hobbes' Schizophrenic Writing
I have spent many hours of my life devoted to studying Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan. It was published in 1651 and is considered a starting point of modern political philosophy. There is however a strange dichotomy between the first part of the book and the second part of the book. Read on to see how I've used data visualisation to show that difference.
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