GTM / GA / Enhanced Ecommerce setup Best practices help is needed - google-analytics

I am new in dealing with GTM /GA / Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and seeking some advice on best practices. We will soon be implementing multiple sites (each having different locale) below is the example of the sites domain structure : www.mysite.com/uk- UK
www.mysite.com/de- german
www.mysite.com/in - india
Here is the approach that i think will work out best...i am planning to set one GTM Account since parent company is same (mysite) but different GTM containers (one for each country) We will be using same GA account for all the countries and all the variable/triggers/events for GA will be setup in their respective container.I will be implementing Enhanced Ecommerce via dataLayer (GTM) and for each purchase, i will be prefixing order id with 2 digit country code i.e uk12345, de35535 etc.
How can i make sure that the GA events can be tracked separately for each country as well so that while looking at the reports, user should be able to track user for individual sites and even roll up the reports for the entire company.
Any best practices. screenshots explanations will b appreciated.
TIA

I would recommend having just one GTM container, pointing to one GA property.
This is much simpler to maintain and manage.
You can then creates views for each of your countries, using filters on subdirectories (Filter Type: Predefined, Include only, traffic to subdirectories, that are equal to, "/in/" for instance). You can create a view with no filters, on top of it, for global reporting.
This also allows you to give users different access rights for each country, if you want an analyst to have access to only one country for instance.
You don't need to prefix the country code to each order number, the "Page" dimension in GA will give you the page from which the order have been passed, that should be including "/in/" or "/uk/".
In our case, we have multiple domains for our different countries (oursite.com.ng, oursite.ci, oursite.ma, etc.), one GA property per country, and one unique GTM containers pointing to the different GA properties thanks to a lookup variable in GTM.
But I ended up copying the GA property settings 14 times (for our 14 countries), it would have been much better to do it only once.
Plus, to report cross-country, we had to use the API to avoid downloading and combining 14 reports every time.

Related

What is the proper way to tag pages in Google Analytics?

I don't even know if "tagging pages" is what I mean.
Essentially, I have a large education website with many types of pages. Specifically, I want to tag our program pages by faculty, level, etc. For example, the Biology program page would be tagged with Science (as its faculty), and Undergraduate (as its level). It's possible that a program could belong to multiple faculties and/or levels (Psychology, for instance, is both a Science program and an Arts program). There is nothing in the URL to signify faculty or level. The website is built in Drupal, in case you know of any modules that could facilitate this.
I want to understand how different faculties/levels/etc perform. I will be building reports in Google Data Studio.
Any guidance would be appreciated!
What you are looking for is called 'content grouping'. If you haven't information in the URL you can define some rules when the page loads and pass the information to Analytics with the pageviews.
You can find more information here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2853423?hl=en
Then you can get these information from Data Studio.
Because of your multi-value needs, nothing in GA is going to satisfy your requirements out of the box. You will have to do some post-processing, and I am not familiar enough with Data Studio to know where its limits are in that regard.
As the previous poster suggested, Content Grouping is the standard way to create custom aggregations of pages. You can have multiple content groupings, such as Faculty and Level, but a page can be in only one group per grouping (not the clearest terminology but it appears to be what Google uses).
A different option is Custom Dimensions. There are two options here. One is to create custom dimensions for Level and Faculty. Each page can still have only one value per dimension, but you could send a comma-delimited string when a department is in multiple faculties (for instance) and then pull it apart again in a spreadsheet.
The second option is to create a custom dimension for Department directly, and associate each department to the appropriate one or more faculties and levels in your reporting.
How you set the custom dimensions or content grouping will depend on your implementation of GA. If you are using the Google Analytics Drupal module, it says it supports setting custom dimensions as a feature. If you are using Google Tag Manager you can set the dimension value in your tags directly, though of course it will need to decide what value to set on based on either totally enumerated rules you write or something it can read out of the page. Here is some Tag Manager documentation: Content Grouping via GTM; Custom Dimensions via GTM.
If the department is present in the page in some consistently marked-up way you can grab it; if not the Metatag module or one of its schema.org extensions might be able to provide you a spot to set a value for GTM to retrieve.

Pushing specific visitor ID into GA as personal identifier (Pardot)

I am trying to get to a point where I can identify visitors who are generating website Goals. And identifying them via their Pardot ID-s in GA.
Do you think that's possible?
On the site every visitor gets a Pardot cookie and in that there is a readable Visitor ID which via an API query can be turned into a Pardot ID.
But how can this piece of information get stitched to the rest of the GA parameters? How to push this into GA as a custom data point so I can create a report on who are the Pardot IDs that completed a certain goal this week?
Is there any guidance you can give?
Assuming, that Pardot ID itself is not a Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in terms of Google Analytics, there are several ways to accomplish this.
You could provide this data as User ID, which helps Google Analyitcs to identify users across several browsers and devices. However, this dimension is not exposed on the reporting GUI or the reporting API. (Available dimensions and metrics can be browsed here.)
Instead, or in parallel, you could store this information in a custom dimension, which, can be used in standard or custom reports, or via the reporting API as well. There a couple of things to consider. According to the Measurement Protocoll reference, the maximum length of this field is 150 bytes. You should also decide, if this dimension is most useful for your needs and possibilities on hit, session or user level, about which you can read here.

How to implement Google Tag Manager across dozens of sites within the same network

We run a network of approx. 80 different sites (unique URLs) within our institutional enterprise network. These sites are separate and distinct, yet are all live within the same organization.
I have been rolling out GTM to each of the sites on a one-by-one GTM Container ID basis -- meaning each site is getting its own GTM Web Container.
I have seen other instances where similar "networks" utilize one GTM Container ID for all sties within their network.
Given my infancy level and experience with GTM, my question is "what is the proper way to implement GTM across multiple separate and distinct sites within the same common enterprise? Create a separate GTM Cid for each site or create 1 common GTM Cid for all sites?
What are the pros and cons to each of these approaches. Are there technical and/or performance issues with creating dozens, if not hundreds of tags and triggers in the implementation approach of a single GTM Cid?
Thank you for helping me understand the most effective way to implement GTM.
There are two ways I can think of to solve it effectively.
Use the same GTM container ID in all your pages. This way you only have to manage one container and all your changes will be live on all pages. However all pages should be exactly the same, when it comes to tracking. If there are differences, you will have to manage gigantic lookup table variables in GTM. For instance if you need to track GA pageviews in separate accounts you will need to lookup domain value and pass the correct UA-... ID value to track the data in the correct Google Analytics property.
You can use separate GTM container IDs and use one container as a reference. The reference container will need to be exported as JSON file. Now this setting can be imported in all other GTM containers. However you need to rename parts of the setup, so you cant just export and import the setup 1:1. Since also here, static variable values like UA-... IDs will be different in your setups.

Is it possible to track actual affiliate sales in Google analytics

I have a website that I built and am getting sales everyday now via "affiliate window" I was curious if it was possible to track the commission in analytics so I am able to see what pages are performing the best?
Thanks
You should look into purpose-built affiliate trackers. Voluum, Thrive, Adsbridge etc. CharlesNgo.com has a lot of info about these.
You can also use these trackers to dynamically insert user data into your landing pages, and they are a lot easier than GA to use. Example: https://charlesngo.com/how-to-insert-user-data-into-landing-pages-using-voluum-tokens/
After a clarifying comment: Yes, you can do this, although with some caveats (one of them that it might not be worth the effort unless you make a lot from your affiliate pages).
You can do data imports, and more specifically you can add data to urls (there are different kinds of data import and "content data" is one of them).
You need a dataset that contains a "key" field that is used to match external data to GA data and one or more fields with values you want to import.
Imported data is always dimensions, i.e. categorical data (that is per Documentation The interface allow to to select custom metrics, but I have not yet tried this and cannot give any guidance on how that would work). So if you try to import revenue you have the problem that new entries will not be added to existing entries, they will replace them
What I would probably do is to sort the data from the "affiliate window" into three categories (low, medium, high), and then prepare a csv file with the urls as first column and the categories as second column.
Then create a custom dimension with a name of i.e. "performance" (else you'd have to overwrite an existing dimension in GA and you probably not want that).
Both custom dimensions and data imports are created on a property level (however you can apply an import to a specific view and I would urge you to test this on a test view first). So in the property settings go to data import, new, content data. Key will be "page", Imported data will be the custom dimension you just created. Check "overwrite hit data" (else the data will not change after the first import, however note that this might make comparisons between different timeframes difficult).
Download the "schema" file (simply a template for your csv upload file in which you insert your data). Click finish.
Next go to data imports, "manage uploads" and upload the file. Processing will take a day or so (errors, if any, you will see shortly after the upload).
Then go to your content reports, select your custom dimension as secondary dimension and you will if the url in question was a low, medium or high performer.
You can automate this via the GA API, bit that's a bit beyond an SO answer.
---- (old answer)---
This is actually what campaign parameters are for. Your affiliate links should be tagged with campaign parameters, e.g.
http://example.com/?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=[[Affliate
Name]]&utm_campaign=[[Campaign Name]]
The things in the angled brackets are placeholders, you would replace those with the name of your affiliate and the name of your campaign.
Now you can look into the aquisition reports and group by source (values for all affiliate links), by source (breakdown by affiliate name) or campaigns, or combinations thereof.
However tracking the commission you pay out via Google Analytics is probably not a good idea, at least from the point of view of your affiliates - JavaScript based tracking is not necessarily accurate enough to track billable services (some people have js disabled or opted out of GA or use adblockers that block tracking etc).
Yes it's possible. You can use sub-id's and fill them with unique visitor data (Google Analytics Used ID). Once an affiliate sale is tracked in an affiliate network, you'll get the sub-id that generated the sale. You can now push that sale to google analytics and let google analytics match the visitor data with their data, showing you the full visitor reports (including landingpage info etc.). You need developer skills to get this working with your affiliate networks but there are complete easy to use tools that does the trick for you such as Ivanhoe.io and Coincrack.

Google Analytics: Profile Workaround

I currently have more than 50 microsites on my main websites. That is I have one main top level domain and I have more than 50 microsites (and growing) in subfolders on that domain.
Previously I used separate GA web properties for the separate microsites (different GA tracking ID's), which worked fine and I was able to track each sites' activity well. However, I talked to a GA staffer over email and he told me I should switch to using a singular GA web property and use multiple profiles to segment the data by subfolder/microsite. That seemed logical for a lot of reasons, tracking users over the entirety of the website in one GA session being the main one.
Anyway, I have one subfolder which houses an array of microsites, numbering almost 40 right now. I don't necessarily need to have a profile for each one of these sites but there are a couple of important ones that I need to report on individually and on a regular basis I'd like to see how traffic to the other individual sites are doing.
So my question: Is there a way in a single profile to segment data to 40+ (and growing) microsites and see month to month stats on each site? Is there a way I can load a profile dashboard with the stats (Visits/pageviews) from each microsite? Is segmenting the data even what I should be looking at? How would you, a more advanced GA user, tackle this problem?
Many thanks for your input!
jimdo (http://www.jimdo.com) offers a Google Analytics based statistics tool for their DIY website creator. They put hundreds of the (usually low traffic) sites in one profile, set a custom var with a unique ID per site and query the results via the Google API, segmented by site id (at least that is what one of their founders told during a web analytics conference a few months ago). Given that the solution works for a couple of million of client sites (their claim is to host 7 million websites for their clients) segmentation based on a unique site id seems a pretty solid idea.
Updated: As custom vars are deprecated with Universal Analytics you'd now use a custom dimension instead if a custom var. Apart from that the approach should still work.

Resources