I care about global SEO. And, if you’re working in any kind of globally active company, you should too. But let’s rewind a little bit and paint a picture of what your website is probably like. Before we get into what the goal of global SEO really is. The contents of this post: The Global Website in a Picture Google as a Cannon The Goal and Problem of Global SEO Confusing the Cannoneer DO Have a Global Gateway DON’T Automatically Redirect Visitors DO Offer Proper Language Selection DON’T Ever Have Duplicate Content

Suppose you have multiple data sources in one Google Data Studio report. Of course, you’d like to filter either on the date or on campaign sources, or input devices or whatever. And of course, you’d like to have one filter control to filter all your tables, hence the complete report. Currently, this is a little tricky in Google Data Studio and all hinges on the so-called “field ID” (This post an in-depth explanation of the steps outlined in Filter Controls and Data Sources.) Let’s create a pretty useful kind of report for your marketing team. A newsletter report. You’d probably […]

I am amazed at how little attention the new Google Data Studio has gotten. I’ve been working with complex systems out there; There are a ton of “data studios” which are extremely complex and need trained people to operate and deliver something, usually not that pretty, on the screen. The Google Data Studio is simple and offers great integration of the default data sources, especially Google Analytics. However, it’s not limited to Google data. And that’s a huge step! Today I’ll show you how you can import WordPress Data to create something like the following dashboard: (yes it’s a simple […]

I’ve already covered one third-party tag in Google Tag Manager and today I’d like to cover the second one. It’s the Mouseflow Tag. Mouseflow basically records and evaluate the actual mouse & click flow of your website visitors. It immensely useful in evaluating user experience on a qualitative level. But the tag isn’t as straightforward to implement as I thought at first; at least not, if you want to have the tag, push some data into it (in my case A/B testing data), and get some data out of it (in my case, the Mouseflow id, which I want to […]

“Help! Google changes my title tag.” Sounds familiar? To me it does. I got that call a bunch of times already, and I got it just yesterday in a new and interesting situation, namely in a rebranding. I’d like to focus on this specific situation because in a company rebranding, this topic is pretty important. After all, how do you want to rebrand, if Google won’t let you? Companies change their name, not often, but it happens. For instance Tesla changed the company name from Tesla Motors to Tesla Inc. beginning of this year, after already shortening the URL to tesla.com in […]

There’s a new cool feature in GTM called a RegEx Table variable. Here’s a simple use case. Suppose your website has subdirectories for each language version. So you’d have website.com/en/with English content website.com/fr/with French content website.com/zh/with Chinese content. For many purposes it’s useful to track those websites in different Google Analytics properties. Now using a RegEx Table variable this has become pretty simple. Where you’d previously either had to create many multiple tags (copies of each other) or write a Javascript variable that extracted the language parameter. For the example above, you can configure a RegEx Table variable in the […]

Passing the value of a form field into Google Tag Manager is pretty straight forward with the dataLayer and the dataLayer variable. But since things vary a bit case to case, I’d like to show one example which you can adapt. The basics are: If you have any formSubmit trigger present in your container, then on submit of any form, a gtm.form object will be passed into the dataLayer. This object contains all the information, especially hidden fields and whatever the visitor filled out. Those values in turn can be retrieved in GTM using a dataLayer variable. Alright, for sake […]

Google Optimize is a pretty cool product, it’s a free A/B tester and it integrates pretty well with Google Analytics via your Google account. But only one way. Google Optimize uses your goals and your traffic data to determine the outcomes of your experiments but you are not able to see which visitor visited variant A/B of your experiment in your Google Analytics data. Or at least I couldn’t find the option. Here is a quick fix for this; Basically we retrieve the information from the Google Optimize cookie, then put it into the dataLayer of Google Tag Manager and […]

Implementing Quantcast tags is super easy with Google Tag Manager as they now offer direct support in the form of two custom Quantcast tags, one for Quantcast Advertise, one for Quantcast Measurement. No need for custom HTML tags. Those custom tags are much easier to maintain, they are less prone to mistakes, easier to debug and more flexible in a sense. Of course, custom HTML can do essentially the same things, but custom tags make things much simpler. Especially using other variables inside the Quantcast tag is now much easier. The Custom Quantcast Advertise Tag The tag can be found […]

I was ready to publish a short piece on copying filters & in general components from one report to another in Google Data Studio, the free reporting & dashboarding tool from Google, when I came across a curious phenomenon, which kind of explains how filters work when you copy them from one data source and apply it to the other. So, here’s something about Filter Controls in Data Studio, what they are, how to copy them and how they work. What’s a Filter Control A Filter Control is an element which adds great variety to your dashboard and reports in […]