Practical Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for Developers

Whether you’re a marketer with development skills or a full-on web developer/analyst, Practical Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for Developers shows you how to implement Google Analytics using Google Tag Manager to jumpstart your web analytics measurement.

There’s a reason that so many organizations use Google Analytics. Effective collection of data with Google Analytics can reduce customer acquisition costs, provide priceless feedback on new product initiatives, and offer insights that will grow a customer or client base. So where does Google Tag Manager fit in?

Google Tag Manager allows for unprecedented collaboration between marketing and technical teams, lightning fast updates to your site, and standardization of the most common tags for on-site tracking and marketing efforts. To achieve the rich data you’re really after to better serve your users’ needs, you’ll need the tools Google Tag Manager provides for a best-in-class implementation of Google Analytics measurement on your site.

Written by data evangelist and Google Analytics expert Jonathan Weber and the team at LunaMetrics, this book offers foundational knowledge, a collection of practical Google Tag Manager recipes, well-tested best practices, and troubleshooting tips to get your implementation in tip-top condition. It covers topics including:

• Google Analytics implementation via Google Tag Manager
• How to customize Google Analytics for your unique situation
• Using Google Tag Manager to track and analyze interactions across multiple devices and touch points
• How to extract data from Google Analytics and use Google BigQuery to analyze Big Data questions

What you’ll learn

• Implementation approaches for Google Analytics, including common pitfalls and troubleshooting strategies.
• How to use tools like Google Tag Manager and jQuery to jumpstart your Google Analytics implementation.
• How to track metrics beyond page views to other critical user interactions, such as clicks on outbound links or downloads, scrolling and page engagement, usage of AJAX forms, and much more.
• How to incorporate additional, customized data into Google Analytics to track individual users or enrich data about their behavior.

Who this book is for

Web developers, data analysts, and marketers with a basic familiarity with Google Analytics from an end-user perspective, as well as some knowledge of HTML and JavaScript.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Google Analytics Fundamentals
Chapter 2 Basic Google Analytics Measurement
Chapter 3 Introducing Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Chapter 4 Testing Your Implementation
Chapter 5 Tracking Interactions using Google Tag Manager
Chapter 6 Goals: Measuring Conversions
Chapter 7 Ecommerce: Tracking Products and Purchases
Chapter 8 Cleaning Up and Enriching Data
Chapter 9 Measuring Campaigns and Troubleshooting Traffic Sources
Chapter 10 Tracking Users Across Devices
Chapter 11 Providing Additional Data about your Users
Chapter 12 GA’s Measurement Protocol: Collecting data from anywhere
Chapter 13 Collecting Data from Mobile Apps with GA & GTM
Chapter 14 Importing Data into GA
Chapter 15 Using GA with BigQuery for Big Data analysis
Appendix: Google Tag Manager and Google APIs