Digital Analytics Review — Week 11
Welcome to a new article on my blog! During this week, I learned together with Chris Mercer and Simo Ahava more details about Google Tag Manager, a great tool that allows us to get more information about our costumers and our website. Thanks to CXL Institute for giving me the opportunity to be a better professional and to learn more about how to help organizations to make better decisions everyday.
In the first lesson we covered how we can actually track various sections of our pages showing up in the browser itself. The lesson objectives for this course is to get beyond scroll, and we did it with the element visibility trigger. It’s a whole new trigger we have yet to play with. One of those may be hard-to-track form submissions. The other one, automated error reports, like this is another use case that we can use for this. We have got our Preview mode pulled up, and we are going to show that the use case first. We have a very popular plug-in that’s been set up for our form.
So we would just go through, we want to track our form submission. That’s a super useful thing. So we went ahead and just set on. So here we have our sort of basic, at this point, basic stuff, and we want to set up a form submission. Now if we come down here, we click on Send and watch what happens. Form submit just fired. Now if we use a form submit trigger which we covered in the basics course, we have a problem, because, A, this form submit, literally every time we click on this, it’s trying to click a form submit, but it’s really not a form submit. So that’s actually not what happened.
In fact we have all these errors that popped up. So we’ve got an error here, we’ve got two errors here. So that’s kind of a challenge. What we want to do is we want to track when they go to the next page. So we can’t really use the form submit in this case, at least not the built-in version. So let’s try it the other way. Let’s try it where they go to the next page and we could track the form submit there. Now if we click on Send, what’s going to happen is we are going to go to the next page. So all these form submits kind of just look the same. We look at variables and see at this form submit, was there anything that was uniqueto the fact that, this actually worked.
And at this point there’s really not. It tells us the form and the form class but that’s all the same across the board. All these form submits are the same. We don’t see anything that says success or not, so we can’t really as a measurement marketer, we are not able to go throughand figure out how to adjust that. So in this case what we need to do if we are trying to measure this, we need to figure out another way, and we’re going to use something called element visibility. So now what we are going to use in this particular case with this particular form, we are going to use the fact of when this particular element shows up in the browser. So that’s going to be our trigger. And then we can send an event to Google Analytics that says everything is hunky-dory and totally working fine.
We’re going to go through here, we are going to go to Inspect. And what I’m looking at is as I scroll up and down here, and we have seen this before in earlier lessons where we were talking about some of the video tracking, if we scroll around, we can see kind of where the element itself is highlighted over in left-hand side. So as we scroll up and down and we see the element, we are looking at this particular element, and of course we can dive down, we are going to keep this very high level, but what we want is we want this particular thing, when this thing reveals itself, and only when this thing reveals itself, do we actually want there to be the trigger, the actual thing to fire in Google Tag Manager.
We’re going to go to Tag Manager because Tag Manager has a built-in triggerthat is just for this. So we’re going to go to New triggers, so this is going to be a new one. And we’re going to come down to where it says Element Visibility. So we’re going to click on Element Visibility. Now the very first thing we do is we determine which method do we want. Do you want to use the ID of whatever the attribute is or do we want to use the CSS Selector? The CSS Selector in most cases actually kind of the easiest one we think to use. So we are going to use that, we are going to show that, but just know that we can use the ID as well. This is something that we need to be familiar with especially if we don’t have any experience with CSS, this is one of those things that we will eventually get better at the more that we use Tag Manager if we’re not doing this.
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!
