5 REASONS TO PRIORITIZE YOUR MOVE TO GOOGLE UNIVERSAL ANALYTICS ~ NOW AVAILABLE ON-DEMAND

During our recent webinar, 5 Reasons to Prioritize your Move to Google Universal Analytics many of our audience members asked very informed questions. We want to share the Q&A portion of the webinar with you.

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Watch the on-demand webinar and come back for the Q&A session summary below.

Question: Does UA help with identifying organic keywords?

No, Universal Analytics will report the search terms in the same way. This stems from a decision of Google Search to hide the keyword info. All web analytics platforms are impacted by this, not just Google Analytics.

Question: Any way to easily filter the tags you are seeing in WASP down to just GA/GTM?  

When the cursor focus is on the WASP window in the browser console area, do Ctrl-F (Find) and enter the name or part of the name of the tag or script you are looking for. It will be highlighted in green and the search criteria will “stick” as you navigate from one page to another.

Question: Have you come across any platforms that GTM code will now work with? Oracle platform appears to be having an issue with the GTM code. The page goes blank after the GTM code has been implemented.

Google Tag Manager runs on the client-side, so the web-server platform shouldn’t have any impact. That being said, we know some web platforms are more flexible than others. For example, one frequent issue is related to the ability to inject GTM in the exact, proper place on the page (immediately after the opening BODY tag, not within any other tag). You might have to work closely with your web development team to ensure GTM is embedded in the right spot in the template.

Question: If I have a lot of event tracking setup to track PDFs would you recommend going the E-commerce route or does that fall under tag manager?

If you want to track PDF downloads, the best way to do that with GTM would be to have link click listener on any .pdf link, and fire a GA event when this trigger happen. This is a much better approach than having hard-coded on-click events on every .pdf links.

 Question: If we switch to new web properties with UA tags, will it be possible to compare to historical stats which were tracked with classic GA tags?

If you create a new web property, you are starting “fresh” and won’t have any historical data. But you will be able to compare various time periods to one another and see if there are any huge discrepancies. However, in my experience, when reimplementing using GTM+UA, you also often revisit the tracking requirements, or uncover areas of the site where the tracking wasn’t done properly. So this inevitably leads to some discrepancies. If you are deploying as indicated in the guidelines, the data quality will be better than ever before.

Question: Is data such as browser, operating system, device also tied to the user ID just like sources of traffic?

At the granular level, yes, complete info is collected. However, this isn’t readily exposed through the interface or the API. One easy way to overcome that is to store the user ID in a custom dimension and then, you will have all the flexibility you want.

Question: Is remarketing via analytics now available with Universal? If you are already using AdWords remarketing audiences via analytics, what happens upon the upgrade?

Yes, it is totally available. When you upgrade your web property from classic GA to Universal Analytics, the existing configurations are also migrated.

 Question: Most of the time, a lot of activity has taken place before the user logs in.  For example, browsing the entire catalogue on an iPhone on the train before buying, in the evening on a laptop from home… so how does one handle that?

If the user never connected on his mobile device, there’s absolutely no way to know who he was. It’s also worth noting user ID only works “going forward” and will not “stitch back” user activity before the sign-in. There’s an advanced way to overcome that by keeping two custom dimensions: one with an anonymous identifier, the other with the signed-in identifier. Through data exports, you can find everyone who was “truly anonymous”, as well as those who logged-in later, and do the “stitching” yourself… a bit complex and certainly highly customized.

Question: We have had issues deploying GTM on Engage landing pages. The error message was related to hosted content being invalid and the missing file was GTM. Do these Engage landing pages need to be set-up differently in order for GTM to function properly?

Though we are not familiar with Engage, but I would strongly suspect a simple misconfiguration/mis-tagging of the GTM container. Since GTM works on the client-side, the specific technology used on the server-side shouldn’t have any impact.

 Question: What’s the impact of running the classic and UA at the same time in terms of site load times? 

There’s no impact, really, as long as both sends to different web properties.

Question: Where to start on transition to Universal Analytics?

The complete process is very well explained here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/

 Plus, here are some related resources that were discussed during the webinar:

• UA Migration Readiness Assessment
• Free! WASP for Chrome
• Online Analytics Maturity Model! Free assessment