Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:07 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 1:55 PM Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>
>> We currently use Google Analytics for analysing traffic on the website,
>> and have done for many years. Whilst discussing some ideas to improve the
>> user experience with Jonathan, it became clear to me that ideally we need
>> outbound link tracking, i.e. what link did a user click that took them away
>> from our site. This is useful to know so we can tell, for example, what
>> download option a user ended up choosing, which can better inform us on how
>> to improve the layout of the download pages.
>>
>> Whilst it is possible to do outbound link tracking directly in Google
>> Analytics, it can be invasive, requiring onclick attributes on every link.
>> It is (in theory) possible to dynamically add those using a script in the
>> base template or similar, but I've never actually been able to get that to
>> work when I've tried.
>>
>> Instead, I'd like to suggest we change to using Google Tag Manager
>> directly in the site in place of Analytics. Tag Manager uses a couple of
>> similar JS snippets to Analytics so would require minimal changes to the
>> site. However, it can then be used (amongst many other things) to enable
>> Analytics site-wide as it is now, and to automatically send outbound link
>> clicks to Analytics globally or for subsets of pages and target URLs with
>> no further code changes.
>>
>>
> Given the number of sites that completely break and fall over when one
> blocks GTM, I have to ask: I assume this can be done in a way that has zero
> impact on those who are sensible enough to block it?
>

I just tested on a couple of sites using it, and blocking didn't seem to
affect use of the sites at all.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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