Digital Analytics Review — Week 10

Hello everyone! Today ends my tenth week at the Digital Analytics Minidegree thanks to CXL Institute. During these days I learned more about the great potential that Google Tag Manager has. Together with Professor Mercer I learned how to apply basic GTM knowledge for increased power and control over data measurement. These days were definitely filled with a lot of information and I discovered how to process information to make better decisions.

In this course, we went through what our workflow will be in Google Tag Manager, including some shortcuts that we’ll be able to use to help make our implementations even easier. First, the lesson objectives: to understand how everything fits together. We introduced some new terms here, workspaces, we’re going to see publishing, we’re going to see versions, and we will begin to be able to build our own workflow process by the end of this particular lesson. Right before that we covered preview mode and of course before that, a little bit about organization.

Understanding Workspaces: We know about Tag Manager now, we know why Tag Manager exists. We know that tags are what we want Tag Manager to do, we know the triggers are, when we want Google Tag Manager to fire those tags. We know the variables are information that Tag Manager may need in order to fire those tags that it needs to fire, so in order, information needs to do the job. We know how to organize with folders and naming conventions. We have an overview of preview mode and how that works. We even covered admin and keeping things organized in the administration section of Google Tag Manager. But how does all of this fit together? What does this whole process actually look like? We went through a very simple set of changes here.

So, when we come in to Tag Manager, we have an option, this is something called a workspace, we were in this workspace, and we were, by default, in the default workspace. We can click on this, and when we do that we have the default workspace along with two other workspaces that are available to us. Now, why would we use a workspace? If there are multiple people backing our Tag Manager container and two people can be in the container at the same time, it is highly likely that somebody’s going to overwrite somebody else’s changes, workspaces helps to keep those separate and siloed so that changes are not overwritten, and if somebody does change something that would affect somebody else’s container, Tag Manager will alert us to that and allow us to update everything so we’re always working off of the most recent version. So it really just helps keep things organized for sure back there, but really from overwriting each other’s changes. Now, if we’re just the only one back here, we probably won’t need to use workspaces an awful lot.

We created some variables here, and what we are going to do is actually not create anything new quite yet, but we enabled some of our built in variables. So we enabled some of these, these are the ones that are enabled by default, we clicked where it say configure and we enabled a few other ones that we know that we’re going to use, and in fact, we started with the forms, we went ahead and clicked on all of those, and we’ll come back to some other ones a little bit later.

We clicked on these and say, go ahead and light these ones up so it starts listening for form details, these are just little listeners that are now active and it’s going to listen for all the information around any sort of forms that might be on this particular page, or on this particular container that it sees. So now our variables themselves have actually, they’ve expanded quite a bit, so we have got a bunch of those. Also notice workspace changes up here. So workspace, which it has six different changes in it. We know we just did that, but if we go to overview, we can also see the list of all the different changes. It will associate it to the exact user, so if there are multiple people back here, we will know exactly who it is based on their login, based on their email address that they were given access to, so we can see who changed what, which is really, really great.

Now, also in here, if I wanted to play around, We could say do we want to get rid of this change or not, I could abandon it if we’ve made some changes in terms of names or functionality of some sort. We also have the ability to edit, we’ll show this a little bit later on. We also have activity history, which shows us exactly what happened, in this case the activity was enabling these different variables and we created a workspace. So again, the bread crumbing, the automatic logging of activities is really great in our work flow process as we’re coming through. So we’ve created our workspace which again, we may or may not decide to do going forward, but we wanted that that was option and it was available to us. We’ve created a workspace, we’ve made some changes to the workspace based on a plan that I had to at least set up some basic variables we know I’m going to need in the future, so we’ve done that, and we’ve checked and we’ve seen that they are all there.

The next thing that we are going to do, and this is again, we are going to do this just for redundancy because we want to show us that we should be doing it in your workflow, is we need to make sure that the changes that we have made are working, that we are not just going to publish these live for everybody to see ’cause we don’t know that something didn’t break or is it really working the way that we thought it was supposed to work. So what we are going to do is we are going to go and we are going to preview those changes. So we are going to click on preview, and now that we have got preview set up, we are then going to refresh our other page, our actual live page and we’ll see preview pop up, and in this case we have the hypothesis now.

This week’s Google Data Studio chapter has definitely opened my eyes to better utilize this platform. Definitely, all that I have learned in these days will help me make better decisions in my organization and decipher what our users want to tell us through our data. Each of the sessions that I had with the teacher and the resources that she offered at the end of the class helped me to complement the information and to recognize each of the new actions that we can do through Data Studio. Thank you very much CXL Institute for the opportunity to continue growing and being a better professional. Never stop learning!