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

Lead scoring is an imperfect science, and one that will depend on where and who you work with. To “score” a lead means to assign it some value that can be used for evaluation of the lead’s quality later. For example, you could qualify or score a lead based on the lead’s budget. If you are a design agency whose projects typically cost $5K-$10K and the client has a budget of over $10k, then that would be a great lead, while if they had less than $1k, they wouldn’t be able to afford to work with you, and it would be a bad lead. You could also evaluate the lead based on the lead’s title. For example, if you’ve determined that leads close at a higher rate if you’re dealing with a VP or C-Level executive, you could score the lead based on who submitted it. If it’s a VP of Sales, then it’s a Hot lead, while a Junior Analyst might be a Cold lead.

Lead scoring is hard because every business is different and there are no industry standards to score your leads against; you have to use your own in-house data and experience to determine what is a Cold, Warm, or Hot (or Bad, Medium, or Good, or whatever other scoring rubric you’d like to use) lead. Before you start scoring leads, talk to as many people on your sales team as you can to determine what makes a lead Hot or Cold, and what information they use to qualify leads. This type of intel is what will help you decide which metrics to use to score a lead.

With that in mind, if you have the data and can qualify your past leads by a particular characteristic of that lead, then you can significantly improve your analysis of your leads using Google Tag Manager (GTM)  and Google Analytics.

[Read more…] about What Is Lead Scoring and How You Can Do It In GTM

Google Tag Manager is top of the heap and still growing in popularity as a tag management solution, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, given its ease of use, clean interface, and shall we say tempting retail price of $0.00. Despite the reservations I always feel when I find myself becoming dependent on a new Google product, I’ve quite liked the experience of using it, and one of the great strengths of that experience is how marvelously not buggy the platform is. Google Analytics, by contrast, has probably thwarted me with 20 or more crazy inexplicable bugs in my seven years’ experience using it (their issue tracker lists the total number of issues tracked as “many”), but GTM hasn’t even let one come to the surface that I’ve been aware of, and I’m not exactly new to GTM either at this point. The other day, however, our fearless leader brought to my attention something that sort of qualifies as a bug, and given that 1) lots of people are finding it frustrating, 2) I completely understand why, and 3) the fix is dead simple but also completely counterintuitive, I thought it would be worth taking a few minutes to outline a solution.

I’m talking about the error message that shows in the Chrome console or in Google Tag Assistant when you’ve placed code for a new container on a site, but have yet to publish the container. In the console, it reads: “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404”, and it looks like this:

[Read more…] about Solving the Google Tag Manager 404 Error Message

Google Analytics can provide a cornucopia of data to website owners and marketing teams. It’s fascinating to see your user statistics beautifully arranged in eye-pleasing visualizations, but seeing the data is one thing — understanding what it means for your business, your brand and your revenue is another.

Let’s talk a bit about how to use your analytics data to formulate a marketing strategy. You will find plenty of posts that explain what “Bounce Rate” means, and how to track Events on your website, but what is really important is how you use this information to improve your website’s performance.   [Read more…] about What Are Your Website Analytics Telling You?