Re: Manage analytics through tag manager?

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?

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>