Google Tag Manager is a great tool that has a lot of opportunities for event tracking. If you are not familiar with this tool and have not used it before start with reading this article about basic concepts of Google Tag Manager. In this article, I will explain how to configure event tracking using Google Tag Manager easily.
An event can be sent to Google Analytics with any trigger. The most common case for event tracking is a click on some button or link.
Thrivecart is used by many businesses for building their sales funnels. They have many useful opportunities for digital marketers. However tracking implementation on Thrivecart is a pain. Thrivecart do not officially support Google Tag Manager.
Here there is the documentation on how to implement Facebook pixel and Google Analytics on Thrivecart.
Currently I got the following request from one of the clients:
I need help creating specific conversion evens for my contest funnel. Very simple funnel. One event for visitors who did not opt in and one event for visitors that opted in.
Discrepancy in data especially in the revenue and transaction number is often an issue for the ecommerce sites that use Shopify. Shopify has a document where they list some possible reasons of this discrepancy https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/reports-and-analytics/discrepancies. However these explanations are not very helpful because they do not contain any practical advice on how this can be fixed.
On our platform we have some reports which show avg. time on page and avg. session duration metrics for the same page. Why is avg. time on page longer than avg. session duration for the same page in these reports? Is something wrong with tracking or reporting?
Video tracking for Youtube videos can easily be configured with build-in Google Tag Manager triggers. But other video players are not currently supported. Fortunatly most of the popular video players have JavaScript API which allows to create listeners and push data about video player events to dataLayer.
JWPlayer has very detailed API reference here https://developer.jwplayer.com/jw-player/docs/developer-guide/api/javascript_api_introduction/
Landing pages report in Google Analytics helps marketers to evaluate the performance of different landing pages,to identify high converting landing pages, to find landing pages with inadequately high bounce rate or loading time, to find landing pages which are not mobile friendly and answer many more specific questions with data.
However there are some issues that can prevent or make it difficult to get useful data from the Landing pages report.
Google Universal Analytics allows importing costs data from any marketing platform (facebook, bing, twitter, etc.). In order to start using this feature you need to create at least one data set for cost data import (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6064692#step_by_step) in the Google Analytics property.
Follow these steps to configure your first data set.
Managing multiple facebook campaigns is time-consuming and requires quite a lot of time to optimize. Facebook Ad Optimization Script generates recommendations for budget adjustments based on the performance of ad sets during last 14 days and 3 days.
It is always important for the marketers to track the source of the traffic in Google Analytics. It is a very easy thing to do if you promote with the help of the Adwords. In this case it is enough to link your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts and all the data about traffic source, impressions, clicks and costs will be automatically imported into your Google Analytics property. But it you advertise with the help of other systems like Facebook you should use utm-marks to attribute your traffic correctly.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free service by Google that is used to configure different analytics, conversion tracking and remarketing pixels (Universal Analytics tracking code, Facebook pixel, AdRoll pixel, etc.)
If GTM is not used all these codes and pixels should be added to the source code of the website. This approach makes it very difficult to implement the pixels (only technical team can do this), difficult to debug (tools are available only for few systems like facebook, twitter and bing) and difficult to update (source code changes are required).
Single-Page Applications (SPA) become more and more popular. They are built using Ember, React, Angular, Backbone, Meteor or something similar.
Bad news about SPA is that adding default Universal Analytics tracking code to such applications will not result in having any valuable data in the Google Analytics account. The reason is that SPA does not generate any pageviews by defaults and pageview hits are not send to Universal Analytics. If no customization is applied to the analytics tracking code one will have sessions with only one pageview and extremely high bounce rate.
Conversions or transactions attributed to “direct” source is an issue for any digital marketing team. When you see direct traffic in your Google Analytics reports this does not really mean that all of these users came to your website from bookmarks or by typing your website url in browser (this happens very seldom indeed). It rather means that the traffic source could not be determined by Google Analytics or was lost while going through conversion funnel.
There are some widely-known cases in which Google Analytics cannot determine traffic source:
Fairplay online is an intelligent gaming portal that unites casual and mid-core games with wager-based competitive mini-games and a social casino. Company has separate domains for 3 different language versions and a number of landing pages on subdomains that are used for PPC and social media campaigns as well as for affiliate traffic.
Do you want to get most of your web analytics tools? Make sure that you do not miss any important data points that can contribute to understanding and optimizing your web usage.
Data points that are essential for most websites are listed below. All these data points can be send to any analytics system such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel.
Monitoring your Google Analytics data regularly is a time-consuming process. Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts let you detect significant statistical variations which can be caused by site errors, issues in your Adwords account or any other problems.
Basic information on how to use Intelligence Alerts in Google Analytics can be found here.
Dashboards organize your data in a meaningful way and turn it into a business tool that helps to keep an eye on KPI's and to point your business in the right direction. Custom dashboards make it possible to visually depict performance of a website, specific traffic source or a campaign at the desired level of detail.
There is a great variety of tools that can be used for dashboarding.