When it comes to event tracking in Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics (GA), redundancy is not a sign of inefficiency; in fact, it’s a crucial safety net.

Implementing redundant triggers for each essential conversion events or GTM tags helps ensure data accuracy and reduces the risk of data loss.

By setting multiple triggers, such as the URL, button text, ID, or class, you ensure one alteration doesn’t spell disaster. In this way, redundancy is your safeguard against unforeseen changes, providing a failsafe mechanism for your data collection.

In this post, we’ll look at why redundancy matters in event tracking and how to set up redundant triggers.

The Basics of GTM Tags and Triggers

Google Tag Manager (GTM) operates on a system of tags and triggers. A tag is a snippet of code that performs a specific function on your site, such as sending information to Google Analytics (GA). Each tag is associated with one or more triggers, which are conditions that dictate when the tag should fire.

Triggers can be based on a variety of events, such as a page view, a click, or form submission. They can also be refined with factors like click classes, URLs, or form IDs, offering a customizable and precise way to monitor interactions on your site.

For example, if you want to track when visitors to your site do something specific—like clicking a button—you would set up a tag to send that information to GA. You’d then set up a trigger to tell GTM when to send that information—like when the button with a specific ID is clicked.

So, when a visitor clicks that button, the trigger fires, and the tag sends the information to GA. This is how you can capture and analyze specific user interactions on your website, providing you with valuable insight into user behavior and website performance.

Understanding the Risks of Single-Point Event Triggers

Relying solely on single-point event triggers is akin to walking on a tightrope without a safety net. This is especially true for larger websites with multiple people or teams working on them, where elements — URLs, button classes, or IDs, for instance — can be altered without any prior notice or communication, potentially breaking your triggers.

For example, imagine you’re tracking button clicks on your website and your GTM tag is set to fire when a user submits a form with a specific ID. But one day, someone from sales creates a new, slightly different form with a different ID, you’re trigger for that event will fail to fire.

When a trigger fails, you don’t just lose a few data points; you risk losing significant amounts of valuable user interaction data that could drive your business decisions.

The absence of redundancy, in this case, could mean the difference between a comprehensive understanding of your user behavior and a gaping hole in your analytics.

Implementing Redundant GTM Tags for Button Click Tracking

This strategy may initially seem like an overkill, but consider this how easily a small miscue can result in days, weeks, or even months of lost data. For the marketing folks and decision makers who rely on… well reliable data, it can be incredibly frustrating to NOT have redundancies to fall back on if something goes wrong.

Diversifying Trigger Elements for Reliable Event Firing

To establish redundancies, you can utilize a variety of trigger elements in GTM. For instance, when tracking button clicks, besides utilizing the button’s ID, consider triggers that fire on the button’s text, CSS class, or even the URL the button directs to.

1. Button Text: If you have a “Buy Now” button, a Click Text trigger could be set to fire when “Buy Now” is clicked. Even if someone changes the button’s ID or class without informing you, this trigger would ensure event tracking.
2. CSS Class: Suppose your button has a unique CSS class. In that case, you could add a Click Class trigger that fires when that specific class is interacted with, providing another layer of redundancy.
3. URL: If your button redirects to a specific URL, a Click URL trigger could be set to fire when that URL is clicked. This adds another level of redundancy and ensures the event is tracked even if the button text or class is altered.

These are just a few examples of how diversifying your trigger elements can help ensure reliable event firing, regardless of changes made on the site. By implementing these redundancies, you’re bolstering your event tracking, ensuring the integrity of your data, and ultimately making more informed business decisions.

The post <strong>The Importance of Redundant Event Tracking: Ensuring Accurate Data</strong> appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

A Little Background

Over the years, I’ve given the topic of digital analytics reporting a lot of thought. Running digital agencies and working with hundreds of clients over the past 30 years, I’ve seen how people of all levels handle (or don’t handle) information. 

I was fortunate to consult with Kering, the parent company of brands like Gucci, Saint Lauren, Bottega Venetta, and others. Running 1-day digital analytics seminars for their groups in cities like Florence, Paris, New York, Boston, & Hong Kong, we engaged in conversations with people in positions ranging from copywriters to group presidents. 

What made this engagement unique was the common goal of all to improve the digital experience for their customers. In one initiative, across multiple business units, we saw how tackling the same goal was being dealt with at all levels and across disciplines. 

Common among all the people we worked with was the basic question: 

“Did I have an impact?”

Digital Analytics & Reporting

That question, “did I have an impact?” is at the heart of how people should prioritize and consume information. It is the foundation for creating and delivering reports.

The experience with Kering lead to the writing of “Digital Analytics: The Culture of Insights and Actions” (Available at Amazon Kindle Edition or download the PDF version). While the book focuses on organizational culture and structure, it also touches on how we can each structure the information we consume.

What we saw at Kering, and across clients, is important information being overshadowed by mounts of interesting information. 

Important information is what you need to know relative to your impact. Interesting information can be anything from broad KPIs that you cannot affect, to things other people want you to know about what they are doing, to fun facts in your industry. While consuming interesting information is great, doing so should not get in the way of clearly seeing the important information. 

Before next year starts, determine what information you need to see in order to know:

1. Did you have an impact?
2. Was that impact what you expected?
3. What might you do next for better outcomes?

For a copywriter, the set of information will be very different than for a marketing director. Both the nature of the information and the frequency it is needed will be different. For your role, what do you need to know, and how often do you need to see it? 

This should be what informs your reporting.

The book mentioned above was written a while ago, so the tools mentioned as examples are not up to date. But, the book is not really about the tools. It is about the culture of the organizations that want to move toward better decision-making on all levels. If you’re thinking about reporting for your organization or your team, take a look; I hope it’s helpful.

The post Better Reporting for Better Decisions appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

How site tracking has worked – client-side

Google Analytics tracking code is a bit of javascript that a website adds to the code that is pushed out to the browsers when a page is loaded. Once a page is loaded, several things can happen and all of them are controlled in the browser. This is also referred to as client-side. 

The tracking code will often tell the browser to create a cookie that is saved to the user’s device. These cookies contain information about the session and browsing activity. No PII is stored, but behaviors and non-identifiable information can be stored. When the user revisits a site or visits other pages on the site, the javascript will access the cookie, retrieve some information from it, and often combine it with the current page load data, then send it to the server. In this case, Google analytics.

What’s important about this transaction is that the entire process is being controlled by Google Analytics, not the website itself. This is known as a 3rd party cookie. 

The javascript sends a unique id (stored in the cookie) and the current page being visited to Google Analytics. In the reporting, this shows up as a “page visit.” 

What is changing? 3rd Party Cookies Being Blocked.

Because of security concerns, browser developers (Apple with Safari, Google with Chrome, and others) have either already or are in the process of restricting 3rd party cookies. While the well-known and reputable players can be trusted to use the 3rd party cookie tech properly, this does expose users to unscrupulous players as well. Within a year or so (the actual dates get changed), we expect the majority of browsers to block third-party cookies completely.

How can Analytics Continue? Server Side Tracking with APIs.

Analytics applications like Google, Facebook, and others have released Server-Side APIs to let site owners send information directly from their servers to the application’s server. This is more complicated to implement than a simple bit of javascript code, but it is the only way to track activity without exposing users to the security risks associated with client-side (browser) tracking technologies.

What to do with Google Analytics now.

There are several steps to take now to be ready for the ultimate shut down of 3rd party cookies.

• Add Google Analytics G4 to your site. It is quite different from Universal, so getting it setup, even with client-side tracking for now, will help you get used to it before it is required. Universal Analytics will not be made to support the API tracking even with Google Tag Manager.
• Meet with your Dev team ASAP and audit what client-side tracking you are doing. In addition to Google Analytics, virtually all ad platforms use js code to track users and report metrics back to their platforms. Getting a full scope of these is critical.
• Plan the priority for migrating from client-side to server-side tracking. If you’re like many organizations, there is more work than resources. You’ll want to be sure the must-haves are on the top of your list.
• Shoot for early implementation on the most critical tools. More the majority of sites, Google Analytics will be high on the list.

While the heavy lifting will have to be done by the dev team, read enough about Google Analytics to understand the scope and options. GA will have the ability to use Google Tag Manager to some extent. Knowing how this can be used for what you need to track can give you more control and alleviate some of the burdens on the dev team.

The technology for tracking is changing. 3rd Party Cookies are being phased out. Start planning for Server-Side tracking technology now to be sure you are not caught off guard in a year or so when browsers like Chrome completely block the 3rd party cookies.

The post Why do we need server-side tracking for Google Analytics? appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

Core Analytics Platform

Our go-to platform is Google Analytics (GA). The reasons are both obvious and, perhaps, not so obvious.

As the most popular website tracking platform, GA is easily integrated with any website. From tracking basic actions like page views, time on site, bounce rate, and sources to easy reporting, GA is great for the basics. It also connects easily with Google Ads, making the sharing of audiences, goals, and key metrics quite easy.

Custom Audience

GA provides a hub for creating custom audiences. The most common application is to track and target general site visitors. But, with the custom audience capabilities, we can segment users based on content consumption, self-selected preferences, or any number of attributes. While the scope can be wide, the value comes from knowing what is important for your marketing efforts prior to establishing the audiences.

External Data

Importing external data into GA allows us to connect off-site data with on-site usage. The most fundamental data is media spend, impressions, and interactions. Properly set up, we can see fairly nuanced data points as well as a full, 360-degree view of media performance.

Google Tag Manager

In addition to GA’s core attributes, Google has also created a great connection with Google Tag Manager(GTM). With a bit of knowledge about the elements of the website, we can easily set up GTM to trigger events and send data back to GA for additional user insights. On-page interactions can be tracked, video interactions measured, and custom dimensions/variables set. Using GTM, we can access page elements, browser variables, or data layers to help trigger events without taking up the developer resources. By combining GTM and GA, digital marketers can gain significant insight into the users.

But, GTM and GA can also allow us to do much more. With the right combination of 1st party cookies, scripts, and database knowledge, we can create a level of visibility into individual user behavior(without violating PII rules.) How this is implemented depends on the client’s needs and questions to be answered. While not necessarily an easy lift, for some businesses, this is a worthwhile investment.

Google Data Studio

While we use GA reporting for some basic management steps, an additional benefit of GA is the integration with Google Data Studio (GDS). From management dashboards to drill-down reporting, GDS allows us to see GA data in unique ways that answer our program-specific questions. 

G4 Analytics

Google Released G4 to allow marketers to more easily feed data from different sources into a single container. This allows us to see a broader range of user interactions across different environments. Consider an online lead or sale that results in a longer-term relationship managed through a CRM. For most businesses, the connection between the two is broken. But, with G4, the CRM can continue to send data, maintaining the continuity of information. 

G4 also sets the stage for the next step in website analytics, server-side tracking. 

Up to now, and at least through 2022, most website analytics data comes from the users’ browsers. This has been somewhat problematic in that it does require third-party cookies and calls from the browser. With some people blocking the third-party cookies, and indeed some browsers doing so by default, the data has holes. But, there are enough enabled browsers to provide good data for tracking and marketing decisions. That’s going to change.

In 2023, Google Chrome will block 3rd party cookies. Once this happens, the continuity of data from users’ browsers will disappear. 

To address this, Google has released a suite of tools to allow websites to use server-side actions to send data to G4. It is through this same paradigm that marketers can think about sending data from virtually any environment to Google Analytics G4. With the right planning, the lifetime actions and attributes of customers can be visible and used to enhance their experience as well as marketing efforts.

The post Website Analytics and Reporting appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

Sticking to a long-term strategy, guided by KPIs connected to sales, or sales directly, takes discipline. To ensure you manage to the long-term success, and avoid knee-jerk reactions, create a schedule of reports that align with your role with a scope that keeps you properly focused. Deciding in advance what KPIs you will monitor will help the organization to stay on track.

Managing the organization requires that each person know their proper role and scope. The KPIs for frontline employees are quite different than a manager, and an executive. By providing each person with timely information (not necessarily daily), you allow each to focus on their core and maintain a steady path with the long-term strategy.

For more on setting up your organization’s digital analytics to stay on course, download our free e-book.

The post Digital Marketing: The Long View appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

Objectives need to start from the top and cascade down, each level responsible for delivering a piece of the goal for the level above. As each person or team works through their objectives, determines the needed resources to achieve it, and most importantly the metrics for its success, they begin to build the plan against which they can measure their performance. By starting with the objectives, teams must build the plan and benchmarks to achieve them; this provides the basis for setting up target metrics for marketing analytics, spending amounts being just one of several.

Lack of consistency / focus
Being opportunistic and flexible is part of being an entrepreneur and can uncover opportunities that lead to long term growth. When these do become parts of the long term plan, spending the resources to set up long term plans makes sense. Until then, be honest about the purpose of this activity and keep metrics at a high level.

If you can’t commit to a direction for at least 6 months (a year plus would be better), don’t building metrics around it. The purpose of creating metrics, tracking and adjusting is to improve your performance. Doing this properly takes time and resources. Too often companies will start down a path and then change in a few months, less than a year. Setting up analytics to track and optimize is a waste of resources and a drain on morale.

Set up analytics to focus on and improve what is important to the long term success of the company. Look back on the past year. What have you been consistently measuring since the start? If nothing, then there is a lack of focus.

Restricted access / sharing
Limiting access to analytics data prevents people who can leverage the information from doing so. Analytics and reporting should be set up for a consistent “view of the truth”, and then openly shared with everyone whose action directly or indirectly impacts results. Particularly in larger companies, silos prevent collaboration, preventing people from assisting each other and identifying opportunities to improve.
Individuals should be provided with the tools to measure and analyze their own performance or KPIs while given access to view the KPIs of others whose activities affect them.

The challenge with digital analytics is not technical, but cultural and organizational. Most companies can benefit from well thought out analytics and reporting processes if they simply make it a priority.

The post Top 3 roadblocks to using marketing analytics appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

1. You care about knowing where your website traffic is coming from and finding better places from which to get it.
2. You have, or are willing to get, Google Analytics (GA) setup on your site.

If you are putting links in social media or paid advertising, you should be tagging everyone of them to understand where your best traffic is coming from. Setting up social postings? Tag them. Adding UTM parameter values lets you see what content is driving engagement.

Most companies that use the UTM parameters do so with paid media, but neglect tagging social messaging and email. I’d even recommend applying the tags to links from your social profiles.

So, what is the UTM code and where does it goes? The parameters and values are appended to your landing page urls.

http://shop.volcom.com/Boardshorts/mens-boardshorts.html?utm_campaign=boardshorts_b&utm_medium=email&utm_source=members&utm_content=bs2_copy2

You have to add the “?”, then add the parameters=value with an ampersand between them.

Below is an example of how a campaign may be structured.

In Google Analytics you can view performance on any of these parameters (called dimensions in GA). You can compare different campaigns, sources, ads, etc for goals or engagement. If you have eCommerce set up, you can track the revenue as well.

Once you are in the habit of adding UTMs to your destination urls, you will start to see a wealth of information that you can use to direct your resources and focus.

https://fd.idatatools.com/analytics/

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Take a look at Adobe’s study and a few things stand out:

Traffic from smartphones is growing year over year (no surprise)
For some industries desktops remain dominant
Users are visiting less and spending less time when the do

This last one is a key metric, and though counter to conventional wisdom, it is going in the right direction.

For some time companies have looked at engagement metrics the wrong way. The perspective has been ego driven. Two components have been number of visits and amount of time on site. But, unless you are a media and entertainment company (or social), users don’t usually want to be on your site any longer than necessary, nor do the want to have to come back.

Users want to do just a couple of things. One, find information or two, address an issue. In the ideal user experience, they come to your site, see exactly what they need and leave.

If they come directly to the site, the home page should be designed in such a way that people can get to the key area quickly and easily. If they use a search engine to get to your site, your pages should be optimized so that they land on the most relevant content to their search. If you do your job right and improve content and navigation, users should actually spend less time, view fewer pages and conclude their activity faster. Making this happen requires resources, including your time and attention.

Take a look at the Adobe report and you will see that the Top 20 sites in each category generally have much better performance metrics than the average. Average time spent is declining. To me, this indicates better UX and content planning is being optimized to user experiences. We need to consider KPIs based on what users are trying to do on the site. This may mean less time and fewer pages consumed.

The post Adobe’s Best of the Best – less engagement is good appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

Good marketers are curious people and seek out information. This is a good trait, but too much of a good thing…

Organizational Culture

Information overload is a major challenge for many people and organizations. We have come to a place where we want information as it happens, 24/7. This is a bad model for managing a company, or even our daily activity. People tend to become overwhelmed and paralysis sets in, relegating them to rote activities that have little foundation in the data.

When I work with clients, one line of conversation inevitably focuses on actionable information. To get there, organizations need to get better at aligning goals across employees, set these up in their analytics programs, providing access to digital analytics in a timely fashion (does not necessarily mean 24/7), and trust people to ‘do their job’. If your organizational culture allows you to get to this point, then there are a few things you can do with information to make it more consumable and actionable.

Segment information into types

Define information types in terms of their level a relevance to your objectives and the actions you can take. I like to look at information in three broad buckets: Actionable, Interesting and Alerts.

Actionable information sounds easy on the surface, but truly defining it for individuals and giving them access to it, can be challenging.  Actionable information needs to meet certain criteria:

1. Your actions directly impact the information you see. It is not just that you can take action based on what you see, but what you see is impacted by your actions.
2. It has to be gathered over enough time for the results of your actions to manifest themselves in the information.
3. You have to receive the information frequently enough that your next actions are still relevant.

For any individual, the amount of information that fits that criteria is very small. As a general rule, the broader your authority the more time your actions take the become visible in the data. A manager of a paid search program can see their impact day over day. The director of digital strategy can take a month or more to see their results. Reports with truly actionable information should be concise. Big reports tend to include a lot of noise; small reports tend to be better.

The next type of information is Interesting information, and is the most abundant. This is data that may be connected with your role, but which is not directly affected by your actions. Back to the paid search manager and director of digital strategy. The manager can’t take action against total site visitors, though the stats may be interesting to him. For the director, the price per click is not something she can affect (unless she is engaging in a role several levels below her pay grade), but she may be interested in it.  If we look through our in-boxes, we notice that they are flooded with interesting information that tends to distract from the actionable information.

Alerts are just that, information that alerts us to the fact that something unexpected is happening. This can be good or bad, but it is related to the impact of our actions and are not (at least we hope) popping up on a regular basis.

What do you do with this?

1. Create reports or dashboard that are laser focused on the information your actions directly affect. Remove the superfluous data.
2. Only receive reports as frequently as needed to take action. Getting reports everyday if you only take action weekly or monthly is a waste of your attention.
3. Review company email distribution lists – the ones you send and the ones you are on. Cull these down to the absolute minimum. Receiving several emails each day with reports that are not actionable to you is a waste of your time, and the time of others.
4. If you are in the right position, ensure that there is one source (one truth) of information and all people have appropriate access.

As marketers we tend to be curious. So our day is not totally consumed with actionable information. We want to read interesting things about our company, our industry and our roles. Set time aside for this so that it does not interrupt your workflow, before or after you core work time. Stay curious, just in a structured way.

One of the reasons I am given for why people look at reports that are not actionable is that they want to be sure nothing is going wrong; they want to spot problems before they have an impact. This stems for a fear that something will be missed. Rather than review non-actionable reports, this is what we use Alerts to handle. Set up your parameters and create alert emails when things fall outside them. Most analytics packages have these (we use Google Analytics).

One of our best traits as marketers can also be our Achilles heel. Structure your information and organize your day to allow for your curiosity while not interrupting your workflow, and your productivity will increase.

Related to this are the roles of “influencers” and stakeholders. These are people who affect our ability to hit our goals. Understanding their metrics, and what they do to achieve them is important to our results. But, that is another topic to tackle in a future post.

The post Digital Analytics: Getting the Right Information appeared first on Fanatically Digital.

What are your metrics?  “I Don’t really know.”

Ok, what is your boss being held to?  “I Don’t really know.”

How about your peers, do they have metrics? “I don’t think so.”

I talk with people a lot about their online advertising and how they are tracking results. They often have some type of digital analytics package in place, but they don’t really know how to use it. So, that’s the reason they don’t have targets… (not really).

The real reason is usually organizational or cultural. The tools can be implemented with a little effort, if you’re willing to invest the time and money. But, they often don’t know what they would measure. It is not just about holding someone accountable to a number. It is more often about providing them with insights into the results of their actions so they can improve the numbers, get things going in the right direction.

Take a copy writer. Are you really going to hold the person accountable for actual revenue targets? No. But, if she is passionate about what she does, she will want to know if the readers are spending time on the content and taking certain actions / clicking. If she can see metrics, she can start to see what drives engagement and actions and incorporate this into future copy.

There is not enough space in a single post to share all my thoughts on the topic, but I did put together an ebook (is on amazon, but hidden apparently as no one knows about it. ). If your are interested in a perspective on creating a culture of analytics, I think it can be helpful.

Digital Analytics The Culture of Insights and Actions

The post Digital Analytics: Are you Measuring & Acting? appeared first on Fanatically Digital.