I am trying to implement GA to track traffic to a Medium page. First of all I don´t know and I couldn´t found if this is trackable at all since I don´t really "own" this url.
I have tried the two ways: by the global website tag (gtag.js) and by Google Tag Manager.
On global website tag I am not really sure I could implement it since I tried to modify the source code of the page but it didn´t save.
On GTM y created a tag (GA4 configuration) with "all pages" activators and it shouldn´t be much more trouble.
The thing here is than when I open the Tag Assitant Legacy it just finds one tag GTA tags and it does with a UA identity, even though I always tried to configure the two options above with the new identities G-XXXXXXXXXX.
All in all, I have three questions here:
Is it possible to modify the source code of a webpage? If it is, is it specifically with Medium? If yes, how?
Why does GTA shows just one tag if I tried to configure two?
Why the configured task shows a legacy identity (UA-xxxxxx) if I always used the new one (G-xxxxx).
Just to finish and give the complete picture here, when I try the Tag Assistant, this is what appears. Here I can only recognize the first code (which is the same than the GTA one). Moreover, it sometimes sends the "can´t connect to the website message" once in a while.
So much problems, so many questions; if anyone can help I would really appreciate that.
Thanks so much!
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Previously working code that downloads a csv file from our site, now fails. Chrome, Safari and Edge don't display anything helpful except "Blob Blocked", but Firefox shows a stack trace;
Uncaught TypeError: Location.href setter: Access to 'blob:http://oursite.test/7e283bab-e48c-a942-928c-fae0907fdc82' from script denied.
Then a stack dump from googletagmanager
This appears to be a fault in the tagmanager code introduced in the last couple of weeks.
The fault appears in all browsers and is resolved immediately by commenting out the tag manager. The problem reported by a customer on the production system, and then found on both staging and locally. The customer advised they had used the export function successfully 2 weeks ago.
The question really is, do Google maintain a public facing issues log for things like the tag manager?
It's not about GTM as a library really, it's about poor user implementation. It's not up to Google to check for user-introduced conflicts with the rest of the site's functionality.
What you could do is go to GTM, and see what has been released in the past two weeks. Inspect things and look for anything that could interfere with the site's functionality. At the same time - do the opposite, see all the front-end changes introduced during this time frame by the web-dev team.
Things to watch for is mostly unclosured JS deployed in custom HTML tags. junior GTM implementation specialists like to use the global space, taking the global variables, often after the page is loaded, thus overwriting front-end's variables.
Sometimes, people would deploy minified unclosured code to the DOM, thus chaotically taking short var names. To the same end.
This is likely the easiest and most common way for GTM to break front-end. There definitely still are many ways to do so besides this though.
If this doesn't help, there's another easy way to debug it: make a new workspace from Default (or whatever is live), go into the preview mode and confirm that the issue still happens. Now start disabling newest created fired tags one by one and pinpoint which one causes the issue.
Let us know what it was.
Solution was to replace the previous tag manager code with the latest recommended snippet
I want to track particular links on my site to see where they come from. For example, I want to know which links on my navigation are being clicked, so if something is not being clicked I could potentially remove it.
I have been using UTM's, super easy, but results in skewed analytics data.
I looked into Google Tag Manager, but I don't want to slow down my website. I can change the site easily, so not sure if this is the best solution.
I found an article dated 2008 that says I can do this:
https://www.example.com/?from=topnav
Is that still valid? Is there a better way. I can't seem to find any information on this and assume somebody wants to acquire this information.
Thank you.
I have been using UTM's, super easy, but results in skewed analytics
data.
UTM codes are meant to track inbound traffic. Don't use them to track internal/outbound navigation, as it will seriously mess up your reporting.
I looked into Google Tag Manager, but I don't want to slow down my
website.
GTM is loading async, just like GA, so performance-wise they are equivalent.
I found an article dated 2008 that says I can do this:
https://www.example.com/?from=topnav
By default GA will not track link clicks. You can indeed add parameters to URLs and then use those to build custom reports and see which links are being clicked.
Since what you're trying to do is custom implementation, you won't find a single best answer, it's up to you to implement something that fits your needs. These are some examples:
https://analytical42.com/2017/track-internal-links-google-analytics-gtm/
https://www.gravitatedesign.com/blog/can-google-analytics-track-link-clicks/
What people are doing is basically taking the UA-XXXXXX code that you normally get with analytics, and they are generating calls against it. This is skewing my analytics stats. On top of that, in Google WebMaster tools, it's also causing this:
It looks like somehow these pages, with my code on or at least with the generated code on, is making Google Webmaster tools think I have lots of 404's. This can't possibly be good for my rankings.
Anyone know if there is anything you can do to stop this?
Try making async call from your server end using CURL.That way you will never expose your GA code.
I have not implemented it, but it might work as per theory
Since you can filter by custom dimensions you can set a "token" in a custom dimension on every page and filter out any traffic in your view settings that does not include the token.
Obviously this will not help against people who use the code from your website (unless you also implement shahmanthan9s suggestion - which is a lot of work but will give you cleaner data), but it will work against drive-by shooters who randomly select UAIDs to send data to (which is the situation you refer to in your comment).
I am working on a project and the site has a lot of the same pages - they are versions of the homepage. But, depending on what page you open, it will give you a different message in a lightbox.
The whole set-up is a bit strange to me, but that's what it is....
So there are countless pages, such as "~/erejib", "~/12312", "~123niwoenf123". Due to there being no fixed length, naming convention or anything, I cannot really use a regex.
However, I could say fire on all pages that contain this lightbox ID. Does Google Tag Manager support this at all?
Thanks,
Chris
Well yes, there is nothing build into Google Tag manager for this particular problem. I ended up writing all the existing pages that I want to exclude into a giant RegEx.
I have GA on every page on one domain (actually not me, but my company, whose programmer needs auditing). Just the default code (Classic version, ga.js), no special accommodations whatsoever that I've seen or know of. Bare minimal if any configuration past registering the service with the main site...
All the pages are either aspx or static HTML. It's common practice for this guy to embed pages on the site within other pages on the site in iframes, where both the parent (top-level) & child (embedded) pages contain the GA script.
I don't really know much at all about GA, have never worked with it, but I do suspect that might result in extra hits being counted by GA or something, that that may be messing with the metrics. But then I've read stuff about GA using first-party cookies so by default pages loaded in iframes won't be tracked/counted... I could really use some clarification on this, please.
Then our programmer frames pages from the main site in pages on other sites that we own, that are on different domains. So then there's this cross-domain business, with no segregation of sources, because they really don't care much. So what should be the outcome of that? The external sites' pages don't have the GA code.
However, we're rebuilding one of those other sites - actually I am, for the most part - and the programmer told me to just copy and paste the same exact GA script used on the main site into that one. So, it's a different domain. That wouldn't work as-is, would it? Wouldn't there have to be some sort of special configuration, setting of the domain, something?
I'd really appreciate if someone could tell me more about the scenarios described above. Thanks in advance.
In the Google Analytics developer menu, you can create a new 'profile' for this new site. The analytics will then be tracked for just that one site, not for all. In theory, it is possible to use one GA.js for all your sites, but it kind of kills the whole concept of Google Analytics, so it's not recommended.
Your really shouldn't be using iframes anymore IMO. There are reasons to use them like embedding code for tracking etc, I think, even GA uses iframes. But, generally Google doesn't like them because a lot of spammers use them to try and fool the Google Crawler.
Also, it get's very complicated to understand what is going on within GA.
To answer your question: Each iframe is like an independent webpage completely separated from the other webpage (for security reasons). So when Google or a web browser goes to your website it will do this:
Load your main html document.
Render that page.
See that you have an iframe.
Load that page in the iframe.
Render the iframe.
Now, if you don't have GA installed on the iframe page it will not track the page being loaded.
But if you do put GA in the iframe it will record when the iframe is loaded or the webpage is loaded.
But, remember that one of the main reasons of having GA is to see where your customers are coming from and why. If you have an iframe of another webpage, you really don't know if that is because a customer is:
A) visiting your website from the page directly.
OR
B) the customer is visiting that page through an iframe on another page.
It can get very complicated
You must generate a new tracker for each domain you are using. Otherwise what is to stop someone from just copying your GA code, and putting it on their webpage.