Working with many clients we have helped implement a wide range of customisations using Google Tag Manager to send custom data to Google Analytics and other platforms. Here are some of the things we have built for client’s who’s businesses need specific data to monitor and improve KPIs.
Enhanced Ecommerce
Enhanced Ecommerce is like Standard Ecommerce reporting but on steroids! It is a much more valuable business insights tool than you will have had available through GA before. Enhanced Ecommerce has a whole new set of functionality to make your website sales reports more in-depth and give you greater insight into shopping behaviour. With Enhanced Ecommerce you can now track the following activity:
- Add to cart
- Remove from cart
- Product page views
- Product Impressions
- Track coupons/vouchers used
- Checkout funnel behaviour
- Shopping Behaviour Funnels
These are just some of the features that Enhanced Ecommerce has – for more detailed information please see our Enhanced Ecommerce Features guide or get in touch to discuss your requirements.
Link Click Tracking
Using Google Tag Manager we can track what links are clicked on a page, this includes both internal links on your site and external links leading off site. This is a great way to see which of your links are actually being clicked and is a great way of seeing where users are leaving the site through the use of links. Some of the business use cases for this are tracking engagement with Social Media buttons, affiliate links or Menu interaction. All of this data can be used to optimise a website or marketing strategy.
Custom Dimensions
Custom Dimensions allow you to combine analytics data with non analytics data. They’re totally up to you to decide what information you collect, as long as it is nothing personal. For example, you can track user types and send this data to analytics, e.g. whether a user is logged in or not. Once you’ve analysed this data you will find that logged in users behave differently than a non logged in user, for example a logged in user may be more likely to spontaneously buy a product if it is promoted to them correctly on your site. In this scenario you may want to think about making it easier or having an incentive for users to log in.
There are almost limitless custom dimensions you can collect and every site will benefit from different custom dimensions depending on KPI’s and goals. Some of the common ones we implement are:
- Page Type
- User Type
- Google Tag Manager container ID and version (for debugging purposes)
- Page Category
- Persona
- User intention
- Is the user a subscriber
- And plenty more!
Weather Tracking
There are many businesses where sales can fluctuate heavily depending on the weather, for example, outdoor attractions or seasonal destinations. Using Google Tag Manager and Weather Reporting API’s we can tie weather data directly into your Google analytics. You can then this use this data to see how weather affects sales and other key KPI’s and Goals. For example you may find that users are twice as likely to convert when it is cold and rainy, this may show you the best time to invest more in PPC.
Form Tracking
Tracking form interactions can show you which forms on your sites are being interacted with, filled in and submitted. You can also extract the values from the form fields and pull this data into GA for the purpose of segmenting as long as it is not personal data. Tracking forms in detail allows you to identify issues with specific fields, for example, we once found a client had 60% of forms being submitting coming back as unsuccessful rather than successful, so added some more tracking and identified that the address field wasn’t allowing enough characters for most users, but wasn’t showing the error prior to users hitting submit. This was easily fixed and user experience quickly enhanced, increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
Video Interaction
Tracking video interactions can tell you with a very precise level of accuracy how much of a video a user has viewed. We can also import this data into analytics and use it see how this data effects Conversions and Goals. E.g. is a user more likely to buy a product if they have viewed the video about it? If the answer to this is ‘yes’ you may want to think about optimising your site so visitors watch your videos. If only 10 seconds are ever watched, then perhaps you need to make the beginning of your videos more engaging or ensure they’re not misleading users as to what they might be about.
What tracking customisations do you need?
If something on this page has jumped out, given you inspiration or you’re not sure if your idea is possible – get in touch and let’s talk about how we can help you. Having worked on many different websites the chances are we know how to do what you’re looking for! And if we haven’t done it before we’d love to work on something new and get the beneficial data you need.