Digital Insights

Element Visibility trigger in Google Tag Manager

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It seems that Google Tag Manager is on a mission to become the best TMS solution in the market. After the recent introduction of the YouTube video and scroll tracking triggers, GTM now gives us  an element visibility trigger out of the box.

This is invaluable for your web analytics data, and something you should definitely consider when planning your Google Analytics Implementation tasklist. With this feature, you are now able to track all the important elements on your web page without exclusively relying on Scroll or Click tracking. You can use the element visibility trigger as an event in order to measure impressions of your footer banners, call to actions, pop-ups, elements that surface post-load (yes they have a DOM listener out of the box as well) and many more.

Without any further ado, let’s dive into it.

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Monitoring your KPIs performance with Adobe Workspace Functions

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Today I am going to show you how to use Adobe’s Calculated Metric functions in order to set up a dashboard and monitor when your critical metrics & KPI’s perform outside normal/predicted behaviour.

Currently Adobe Sitecatalyst gives a feature called “anomaly detection”, know to most Google analytic users as “Intelligent alerts”.

Anomaly Detection in Adobe Sitecatalyst and why you don’t really need it

Anomaly detection will spot unpredicted behavior – whether this is positive or negative – based on previous data you hold (you can read more about this here). They way it does this is by calculating the daily total for the selected metric and compare it with the training period using each of the following algorithms:

  • Holt Winters Multiplicative (Triple Exponential Smoothing)
  • Holt Winters Additive (Triple Exponential Smoothing)
  • Holts Trend Corrected (Double Exponential Smoothing)

Each algorithm is applied to determine the algorithm with the smallest Sum of Squared Errors (SSE). The Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) and the current Standard Error are then calculated to make sure that the model is statistically valid.

Theoretically speaking, Triple Exponential Smoothing is ideal for including “seasonality” trends (unlike Double exponential), however Anomaly Detection biggest weakness is it’s 90 day window.

90 days is pretty much insignificant for retail web sites where seasonality and trends plays a big role in terms of performance, hopefully they will add a YoY feature in future releases but in case they don;t that is ok because as long as you have the data available you can do it yourself as shown below.

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Real Estate Dynamic Remarketing, A setup guide

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In this guide, i am going to show you step by step how to set up correctly Dynamic Remarketing for Real Estate.

Dynamic Remarketing allows you to show ads that contain messages, pictures and prices from the exact properties that the visitor viewed on your real estate website instead of traditional remarketing where you build audiences based on certain rules and target them with a set message/banner.

Effectively you dynamically create ad banners and messages directly from web site resources and all this happen automatically by adding/removing properties directly into your CMS without having to worry about updating your ads.

There are multiple steps you need to take in order to set up your dynamic ads, so without wasting any more time, let’s dive into it.

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Google Analytics Implementation Guide for Beginners

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We discussed on a previous post the different Google Analytic Code configurations you can do in order to set the correct tracking on your web site.

Today I am to show how to plan your Google Analytics Implementation setup by providing a guide with detailed task lists, linking at the best sources/blogs I have seen on the internet. Those sources, hopefully, will take you through the process whether you plan to use Universal or an Enterprise (Google 360) Solution.

Please bear in mind that this was useful to me a couple of years ago when I worked on an acquisition focused web site and it is NOT a good guide for e-commerce web sites.

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How to measure your YouTube video length performance

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Quick post today about YouTube video analytics and in particular how to measure your Youtube video length’s performance with scatter plot chart .

This information will help you make decisions around your video content length creation as well as help you decide at which point you should position your call to actions.

Note that the analysis below makes more sense to long length videos rather small 30 seconds advertorials. The samples below were taken from 30+ minute webinars that were promoted via YouTube advertising.

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Find Information Conversion Rate – The low operational costs metric that matters

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This metric (find information conversion rate) probably won’t mean much to most people, however it is not uncommon on retail or customer focused web sites. 

Call centers can cost a lot of money for tasks that a user can complete online and a lot of retail and customer service companies are now working on digital products and optimisation roadmaps in an attempt to digitalise self-service customer tasks and reduce costs.

What is Find Information Conversion Rate?

 The big book of key performance indicators by eric peterson from Neo Consulting is describing in great detail what this metric is about, but if you can’t bother reading the whole chapter, I summarize below a couple of examples of what the metric is and how it should be used.

A lot of web sites hold critical information that can lower operational costs by preventing site visitors from placing a phone calls such as “when is my order going to be delivered“?, “I placed the wrong order online, how can I change it“, etc, since this kind of information can be found online.

HELP microsites, FAQ or other INFO type pages, exist for that reason, however with minimum understanding of digital behaviours this can lead to poor results.

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Adobe Marketing Cloud Pulse Chrome Extension

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Back in 2010, Adobe introduced Digital Pulse Debugger, a JS snippet that you could add to your Bookmark and act as your Sitecatalyst, Test & Target, AdLens and Audiomanager debugger. Effectively, an image requests that shows you via a basic interface all the variable and success events that fire once your page loads amongst other useful information such as Report Suite ID, Visitor ID etc.

Pulse became a must have extension, however it lacked the ability to show you a sequence of requests (you could do that with Charles), onclick events and variables that fire without a page load as well as possible errors with your variable settings within the admin console. For that you have to go via the network option in the development console or use 3rd party tools such as Observe point and Charles.

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Pushing DataLayer Values in Adobe Sitecatalyst variables via DTM

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Quick post this week on Adobe DTM and dataLayer values.

Once your SDR is setup and your dataLayer implemented on your web site, the first steps you need to make is push all the dataLayer values into the relevant Props and eVars so you can start populating your Sitecatalyst and Workspace reports with data.

The first step you need to take is create your data elements in Adobe.

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How to set up an optimisation test with Google Optimize (BETA)

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Another quick post this week to show you how to set up an optimisation test with what seems to be Optimizely’s new competitor, Google Optimize (Part of Google Analytics 360 Suite).

The product is still in BETA, so not sure how many more additions they plan to make; however, at a first glance it seems that Google is ready to start getting some market share from the optimisation world.

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Setting up Adwords Conversion Tracking with Adobe DTM

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Quick post this week on how to fire Conversion tags (Adwords, Facebook, etc) with Adobe’s DTM.

For those who do not know this, DTM is the default tag manager solution adobe offers alongside Omniture. It used to be called “Satellite” and was part of a marketing agency called Search Discovery.

Adobe acquired the company years ago and offer that particular solution as a default/out of the box TMS for Adobe SiteCatalyst implementation.
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