- Using GTM with a Content Security Policy (CSP) and impress your DevOps team in the process The internet is a beautiful place. If you think chaos is beautiful, that is, because it is also a place where everyone and everything is hacked, abused, and manipulated for money, status or just the lolz. To prevent your precious Google Tag Manager implementation —and your entire site for that matter— from falling victim to malicious code taking over checkout funnels or secretly listening to form input from visitors it's time to implement a Content Security Policy (CSP). Continue reading...
- Tf-Idf in Google Sheets: implementing text analysis, keyword counting, tokenisation and stemming in a spreadsheet Google Sheets, the online Excel alternative, is basically the Swiss army knife of any modern knowledge worker. We're adding to it's multitude of uses and abuses today by creating a custom Tf-Idf model _in_ Google Sheets. A Tf-Idf model can help us digest large quantities of text like reviews, comments, feedback, chat histories, and even 17th century philosophy books with ease. Continue reading...
- Cookie Consent: A Simple Checklist for Compliance With terms like GDPR, Cookies, ePrivacy Directive, ePrivacy Regulation, ITP, ETP, most people's heads will start spinning. Nonetheless, not complying with privacy regulation can be a costly business in multiple ways. Find out what's what and how to check if your website is compliant. Continue reading...
- The 5 essential steps of a (web) analytics pipeline: collection, routing, ingestion, storage and visualisation When we think of analytics we think of tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel or even Tableau or PowerBI. But analytics is not just a tool. When we understand the mechanisms behind these tools we are ready to see what each of them brings to the table and how they might solve the problems for the unique snowflakes that we are. Continue reading...
- Why Google’s new GTM server-side tagging solution is a big win-win for both your website and Google. Just a few days ago Google released a new version of their tag management system: Google Tag Manager Server-Side. Here’s why it’ll have a massive impact on analytics, advertising, A/B-testing, privacy and Google’s own cloud solutions. What on earth is server-side tagging and why do I need it? Continue reading...
- Building a complete tag monitoring solution for Google Tag Manager Do you know if all your tags are used in Google Tag Manager or if you can remove some? Do you know if they work for all your users? Or if they fire on the right dataLayer events and how long they take to execute? Follow along for a complete solution to monitor your Google Tag Manager implementation including a dashboard. Tag monitoring will allow you to understand if important tags are actually firing for real users on your site and see when they break down. Continue reading...
- 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. Continue reading...
- 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! Continue reading...
- 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. Continue reading...
- 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. Continue reading...
Beyond Measure
Hi! I’m Dumky, author of The Fundamentals of Analytics Engineering. I write about mostly technical topics related to analytics and data.
