How to track HTML 5 Videos using Google Tag Manager?

If you have a lot of videos embedded on your website which are not YouTube videos, it will be slightly difficult for you to track the video events using in built options of Google Tag Manager. However, we can use Custom HTML tag with few triggers and variables to achieve the tracking for any kind of HTML 5 video. If your video player uses HTML 5 format, then the below library can be used.

Here, we will be tracking "play", "pause", "complete", "milestones - 25, 50 and 75%" with the library and all of these are tracked as events in Google Analytics. Let us zero in the data we want to see in the reports. I want the event fired from the video to contain the below values

What is Channel Grouping and how to automate the rules for multiple Google Analytics views?

Recently I was working on a small requirement where I had to update all the 13 views under a Google Analytics property's Channel grouping rules. The catch here is the updated rules for all the 13 views look the same. I started updating the rules for one view and at the end of updating for one view, I am completely tired. So I was scared about the task that's in front of me. Then, I hacked into the Chrome Developer Tools and wrote some code and boom I was able to automate the processing of entering the rules and save it all in one click.

Google Tag Manager Tutorial #1: The Interface and creating our first tag!

It's been a long time since I have written something here. I wanted to revive this blog for a long time and today is the day! If you are new here, don't mind! Let's dive into the topic. I have written an article on the basics of Tag Management System quite a long time ago. If you are new to Tag Management and are in the Digital Analytics industry, do read the above article before proceeding to get a basic understanding. This will be a series of articles which is completely dedicated towards Google Tag Manager (GTM), a free tag management tool provided by Google. You do not need any prerequisites of programming but should be able to understand the basics of Digital analytics tracking. We will cover various aspects of complex tracking and programming as we go through the tutorials.

High-level working of GTM

In this first tutorial, let us understand how GTM works on a high level and get an overview of the interface and publish our first Google Analytics Tag.

Why Hour of Visit is an important metric? How to track it using Google Tag Manger in Google Universal Analytics?

Last week I have written an introductory post on Google Tag Manager explaining how to implement Google Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager. You might have observed how easy it is to implement the Google UA base code with GTM. It's just a simple plug and play operation. But that's not our whole aim, isn't it? We need to understand what kind of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are we looking for considering the website on which we need to implement the tool and there by come up with perfect Metrics which can be translated into our needed KPIs. This is the whole purpose having a Web Analytics tool at place, to understand the most needed KPIs and how they are being affected by different things.

So, let us consider one such KPI in our present post and simultaneously let's see how to implement them using Google Tag Manager and what all configuration needed to be done on Google UA.

Most of the web is filled up with Content based websites. For example, my blog comes under such category. I just write some posts related to Web Analytics. So, what am I interested in? What patterns am I looking for? How much can I change my marketing pattern or writing pattern?

How to implement Google Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager (GTM) on your Blog or Website?

So, you have decided to track your website or blog (blog in my case) and started to searching for free web analytics tools and found that none other than Google provides one. Now you are under confusion that Google has two versions of analytics namely Classic Analytics and Universal Analytics. Don't be confused, go ahead and implement Universal Analytics. Of course the advantages are many which will take another post to talk about it.

Now that you have decided to use Universal Analytics on your blog, how do you implement it? Not the traditional way but the newer one using Tag Management tool. Again none other than Google's Tag Manager! (Read: Understand the Basics of Tag Management System).

In this post, I would like to explain you step by step process on how to implement Universal Analytics using Google Tag Manager (GTM) on your blog.