CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Review #8
Learning the beginning of Google Tag Manager wasn’t too bad. Learned all the beginning stuff and I’m barley touching the surface. In Mercer’s Intermediate Google Tag Manager course, he goes further in into Google Tag Manager. He shows there’s a lot more things you can do with it. He gets more detailed with Google Tag Manager’s other functionalities. He shows more advanced type of tracking and things you can do with tags, triggers and variables. Very interesting stuff. He gives ideas outside the box and how your company can utilize more advanced level data tracking. The intermediate course is harder and there’s more to learn.
I feel like there’s way more you can do with Google Tag Manager in terms of customizability compared to Google Analytics. Tag Manager is something that I have to play around with. There’s so many things we can do that we don’t know about. I feel like I’m learning a lot of secret advanced stuff that can’t be found elsewhere. I’m curious to know how many digital agencies use Google tag manager the way it’s used in the course. I wonder how many people are Google Tag Manager experts in the world and how they use it for their organization.
Mercer goes over more advanced and in depth dives of tracking. He shows and explain advanced video tracking engagement. He shows how to track Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia and JW Player. He talks about JSON code and how to establish that code within GTM. Each video player is a bit different. He makes it seem easy to implement codes and track videos. It’s very cool that you can track videos with Mercer’s advanced techniques. You can track actions like play, pause, skip and percentage of the video played.
We can also track page elements. Page scrolls, form submissions, and error reports are somethings we can track. We can track users page scrolls. What percentage of the page did they scroll? 10,%20%,50%, 75%? Give you an idea of how engage users are with your web page. One problem with form submissions is that errors can often occur. Mercer explains that Google Tag Manager still fires with form submission errors. He shows how we can circumvent this problem. This will make our data more accurate.
In Google analytics, there’s standard ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce. We use Tag Manager for more transactions tagging. This is very useful stuff if you’re running an ecommerce business. My goal is to have an ecommerce business one day. And learning how to do advance ecommerce tracking and analytics is very helpful. I know now how to track ecommerce sites and figure out how they’re doing in sales. enabling these stuff in the data layer is confusing and hard. I’ll need my developer to handle these type of things. Setting up GTM properly on bigger ecommerce sites is challenging and tricky. You have to really plan it out and work as a team with your marketers and developers.
He goes further into setting up custom dimensions and showcasing metrics. Metrics are the numbers and dimensions are qualitative description. Custom dimensions are Hit timestamp, session ID, Client ID, User ID, Hit type, Full Referrer, Payload Length, GTM container ID, redirect count, navigation type, tab type, tabs open and Tab ID.
He shows how Users ID works. why it’s important to collect user ID and how to set up User ID tracking. It’s very interesting how to collect User ID in Google Tag Manager. Mercer shows how to set up User ID tracking properly in GTM. What variables to use, what tags should fire and when should triggers trigger. Google Analytics needs the Google Analytics settings variable. It requires you to take advantage of this variable and adjust it. You can grow it. When collecting User ID, we have to take privacy laws into consideration. Especially laws like GDPR, we have to be more compliant with our data and how we are collecting them and what are we doing with them.
From time to time it’s necessary to have Google Tag Manager help make decisions for you. You can do so with table variables. There’s the look up table and Regex table. These tables help automate your configurations. Look up table is simple but restricted. Regex table requires more skill but is flexible. Regex tables are beyond exact match where look up table is exact math. Regex is complex and something that I need to take time to learn.
Along with table variables, there’s also JavaScript variables and event variables. There are two primary JavaScript variables, the regular one and the custom JavaScript variable. With custom JavaScript you can add more customizations and other 3rd party code to add onto your tag manager account. Mercer shows that there are more things you can do with this. Mercer shows how to use dev tools to find existing variables and how we can copy and paste code.
When you want to be able to take action at a very specific time, then event variables come into play. You can set up auto event variables or custom event variables. Custom events are straightforward. Variables are built in for auto event variables. Things like page url, page hostname, page path and referrer are built in for tracking. In Custom events, you can customize your event tracking. Very useful to track pages, utilities, errors, clicks, history, videos, scrolling and visibility.
Almost every website today has cookies and collects them. A lot of websites have privacy cookie policies pop up. Mercer shows that you can configure cookies with custom HTML code. It’s a bit of an extra step, but he makes it seem simple. He explains and show how to enable first party cookies. He shows a demo site and how the cookie tag and variables work. I need to learn how to set the cookie and read the cookie to get familiar with this. Mercer provides a link to Simo Ahava’s blog that explains cookies and other Google Tag Manager related things in more depth. Some very good information for me to read and learn. A lot of great content on his site. I need to take some time to read all his content. Very difficult and challenging to understand.
I don’t know a lot about API’s but it seems you can do a lot of (Google) Tag Manager’s API. Mercer goes over this briefly. It allows you to build your own GTM tool. Having access to Google tag manager’s backdoor data is cool. It seems like you can do a lot of different things with it. Mercer shows a demo of Simo’s Google Tag Manager tool. This way to advanced for me. It’s a good thing I have developers who can utilize this stuff.
