If your new year resolutions for this year included "help your friendly marketer be more successful", I have something for you today. It's a fairly straight-forward thing to do, but it'll help her big time: build a proper, solid data layer for her. There are countless blog articles out there about the advantages of having …
Category: Opinion
Articles that are less technical and more opinionated
Agile? Not yet!
I have to make a confession: we're not ready for agile. I don't expect anyone to jump up and angrily shout "of course we are! We're doing agile right now!", because, frankly, it is not about what we do that I worry. Analytics loves Agile When I was a developer, back in the late nineties, …
Plugins: New/Repeat vs VisitNum
Here: I would always use the getVisitNum plugin instead of the getNewRepeat plugin. They have a similar use case. Your friendly marketer will probably compare your new visitors against those who've been to the site before. I bet you she has targets that are linked to acquisition of new visitors or rather new customers. Most …
What does a Digital Analytics department do?
I was going to move on to the next step of my journey, replacing more plugins with Dynamic Tag Management features when I came across and article written by Richard Hayes, that I really want you to read, especially if you are a developer and not an analyst or marketer. Read this: What does a …
Continue reading What does a Digital Analytics department do?
Data Elements vs Data Layer
Have you used a Tag Management system yet? And a Data Layer? Both are good ideas in our business, for a variety of reasons. The one I think is most relevant in this context here is that defining a Data Layer makes a lot of requirements, possibilities, assumptions and limitations explicit. I think in a …
TDD for Analytics, please
Let me throw out an idea here. Given that you are a developer, I hope you can a) appreciate the idea and b) help me develop it into something that works. The idea is to use test-driven development for Analytics or maybe for digital marketing tagging in general. Motivation I recently attended a conference in …
Implementation Phase is NOT Key
I published an article on my German-speaking blog last week about the implementation phase and how I think it is more than overrated. Feedback was interesting, so I think it makes sense to summarize it here as well. You - being a developer - might not need to be convinced, but you might want to …
Simplicity is Hard
This article is not about development as much as it is supposed to give you, the developer, a handle on a subject that should be dear to you: simplicity. You're a developer, right? You have seen what happens when things are done as simply as possible: less bugs, easier maintenance — beauty emerges. It's the …
2013
2013 draws to a close, for some of you it ends in just a couple of hours. Time to look back and maybe think about what 2014 will be like? Nope, everybody does that. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about who I am and why I am doing this. I started this blog in …
s_gi() and Tracking Links
Today we'll discuss one of the big questions of all times: when tracking links or actions, is it necessary to call s_gi()? If you don't know what I'm talking about, go and read the article on Tracking Links & Action while I wait. At the heart of it is this piece of code: <script type="text/javascript"> …
