Analytics

Working on websites, we work in rows and rows of data. A lot. But what happens when an executive wants to know more about that project you are notating from a data export? You have to turn your mind-numbing spreadsheet with filters and color coding only you might understand into a more digestible format. Now comes the hours and hours spent copying over information into a presentation. 

Not anymore!

With Google Apps Script, you can inject data from Google Sheets into a template in Google Slides and generate hundreds of pretty slides in just minutes.

[Read more…] about How to Inject Data from Google Sheets Into a Google Slides Presentation

There are a lot of posts on the internet about cross-domain analytics tracking, subdomain tracking, and even cross-frame (X-frame) tracking. Some are pretty solid, yet many aren’t current and/or accurate, a fair number are just confusing, and only a few of them cover all three topics well. While this does not purport to be “the one post to rule them all”, it can absolutely serve as the definitive answer to how I think about cross-X-tracking and walk most people through implementing a good solution.  

I’m a firm believer in the guideline that, “if you find yourself answering the same question three times or more, you need to make it into a blog post.” By that thinking, this post is years too late, but better late than never! 

Skip To:

• How to Configure Subdomain Tracking
• How to Configure Cross-Domain tracking
• How to Set Up Cross-Frame Tracking

Before we get into “how”, let’s discuss “why”.

[Read more…] about Cross-Domain & Subdomain Tracking in 2019

If you’re like me, you long ago committed to using Google Tag Manager as your one and only platform for configuring your site’s event tracking (and — though it perhaps isn’t the optimal way to go about it — maybe your structured data markup too). To set this up in GTM, you had to create Custom JavaScript variables that used CSS or jQuery selectors to identify the correct elements on the page, and then create tags that arranged those variables into scripts that would pass data to Google Analytics, and/or to Google Search, in a comprehensible format. Those CSS or jQuery selectors were precisely tuned to the unique HTML of the pages where the tags needed to fire, relying on the signature attributes —like id or class — of the key elements in order to identify them. You might have had to go through a frustrating trial and error process to configure some of those variables so that they would populate correctly every time, on every page, but you got there.

And now you hear that the site is going to be redesigned from top to bottom, and the HTML signatures you relied on are all going to vanish or change. PANIC!

[Read more…] about How to Prepare Your GTM Container for a Site Redesign