Category Archives: Analytics

Track WordPress Contact Form 7 with Google Tag Manager

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Here’s a quick tip to track form submissions in Contact Form 7 plugin with Google Tag Manager.

Note: If you’re using DuracellTomi plugin for GTM, here’s a great article to follow.

If you added GTM directly to your WordPress template and tried to track form submissions with the default settings, you may have noticed that there’s no gtm.formSubmit event in debug mode.

It’s quite easy to fix this. Let’s start with the trigger:

1. Name your trigger.
2. In the Configure step uncheck Check Validation.
3. In the Enable When section select the page your form is on using Page URL contains or equals /your-page-with-form/
4. For Fire On rule I’m using the CSS class of Contact Form 7 forms: wpcf7-form
5. Save your trigger.

trigger

Now let’s create the form tag:

1. Name your form tag.
2. Select Google Analytics and your analytics type.
3. In the Configure Tag section paste your GA ID (or use constant variable) and specify the event category and action.
4. Select the trigger from the previous step in the Fire On section.
5. Save your tag.

form-tag

At this point you should be ready to go. Click Publish – Preview to enter debug mode, open your website and do a test transaction. You should see the proper gtm.formSubmit event executed and your tag being fired:

formsubmit

Good luck!

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

Google Analytics Funnel Builder with mandatory first step

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As a follow-up to my post about discontinuing PadiTrack and the suggested alternative with Google Sheets, here’s a short update after a few people requested a version with the option to select mandatory first step of the funnel.

So, here’s an updated version of the GA Funnel Builder where steps 2 through 10 require that the visitor has also viewed step 1. To save the document in your account, select File – Make a copy.

As a future version we’ll see how to add events to the pageviews being tracked as funnel steps.

If you have any other questions or ideas, please share them below.

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

How to create conversion page path report in GA

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By default Google Analytics doesn’t provide a page path report. You can see the entrance and second step (Behavior – Site Content – Landing Pages – Entrance Paths) and in the last 3 steps before a conversion (Conversions – Goals – Reverse Goal Path). But if you’re running an ecommerce store, often the last 3 steps are part of your shopping cart and they’re pretty much the same for all conversions.

Understanding what pages customers are viewing and in what sequence could give us valuable insights, so let’s try to get this data using Google Sheets. I explained how to add Google Analytics add-on to Google Sheets back in December.

What we’d like to do now is built a custom report with more than 2 dimensions that are sorted in a particular way.

1. Start a new Sheet document and select Add-ons – Google Analytics – Create new report.

2. Select your GA Account, Property and View ID and the following metrics and dimensions:
Metrics: ga:pageviews,ga:entrances
Dimensions: ga:pagePath,ga:date,ga:hour,ga:minute

3. Hit Create report and add the following for Sort and Segment:
Sort: ga:date,ga:hour,ga:minute
Segment: sessions::condition::ga:transactions>0

Note: If you don’t have ecommerce tracking, you can use a segment sessions::condition::ga:goalXCompletions>0 where X is the number of your goal

4. Update your time range (Start Date and End Date) and Max Results.

You may also want to expand the Max Results to 10000. So your final configuration will look like this:

report-configuration

It will take only the sessions with transactions and show you the pages in these sessions, sorted by date, hour and minute, so basically it shows the path of each customer. The Entrances will show you which is the landing page for each session.

5. Run your report: Add-ons – Google Analytics – Run report.

report-result

Analyzing the data in this scenario will be possible with up to 200-250 conversions for the time range you selected. If you have more conversions, you may wish to add another dimension like City, or implement custom dimension for GA Client ID so multiple sessions happening at the same time are not mixed up.

This custom report is pulling hit-level data, so next week we’ll see how to combine it with session-level data like Transaction ID, Source / Medium and Revenue.

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

5 Google Analytics posts you don’t want to miss in June

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Here’s again the last post of the month saved for the top 5 interesting Google Analytics related resources I found on other sites. Here are the five for June – you may want to bookmark those as they can be very useful:

Google Tag Manager course in Google Academy

Here’s the brand new Google Academy course, dedicated to Google Tag Manager fundamentals. Besides the core concepts and principles of tag management, how to create tags and manage firing rules, and how to enhance your Google Analytics implementation, you’ll learn some more advanced topics like Dynamic Remarketing for AdWords. If you want to receive a certificate, you should complete the assessment before July 25th.

GTM-certificate

Videos – Evolve with Google Analytics 2015 – San Francisco

Here are the recordings from Evolve with Google Analytics conference held in April 2015 in San Francisco. You can watch the presentations: Google Analytics Universal and Data-Driven Decision Maturity, Evolution or Extinction: Survive and Thrive with New Google Analytics Features & Google Analytics Premium, Mobile Planet: App and Cross-Device Tracking in Google Analytics and others…

#GTMTips: Add Google Tag Manager To Your Blogger Blog

I think going forward I’ll have to save one of the 5 spots for Simo Ahava, because he’s publishing so many valuable content all the time. This one is a quick tip how to add Google Tag Manager to Google Blogger. I was personally struggling with this not knowing the solution is that simple. Enjoy!

Cross Domain Tracking with Google Tag Manager

Wondering how to properly setup your GTM tag for cross-domain tracking? This post from LunaMetrics shows you how to do just that step by step.

100+ Google Analytics Remarketing audiences for Retargeting

If your main remarketing list consists of people who visited your website but didn’t purchase, here’s an exhaustive list of ideas to segment your remarketing audiences in much more targeted ways and receive better results.

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.

3 Reasons Why the Free AdWords Call Tracking is not Right for Your Business

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When Google AdWords launched the call tracking product for free it sounded very exciting. A lot of business owners and marketers thought (and still think) it can replace a paid service like CallRail for example. Unfortunately, not so fast. Here are 3 reasons why the call tracking from AdWords won’t be enough for you:

1. It works only for call extensions

If you go through the instructions for Website call conversions and Call extensions you’ll see that you need to connect your call tracking with a call extension. This means that AdWords will dynamically change the phone number you specify and track a call to it as a conversion only if the user clicked on an add with a visible call extension. In other words, it won’t work for your other AdWords campaigns/ads that don’t have call extensions. Even if you add call extensions to all ads, there’s no guarantee they’ll show up every time as this is something AdWords determines.

2. It won’t work for other traffic sources

If you want to track all calls from your website and attribute them to the respective traffic source, this won’t be possible with AdWords call tracking. Yes, you pay for AdWords traffic and it’s good to show some call conversions and ROI for (part of) it, but your other traffic sources (SEO, social, email, etc.) are either also costing money, or your own time and efforts.

3. No option to import in Google Analytics

While you can easily import goals from Google Analytics into AdWords, the other way around is not available yet. If you use AdWords call conversions, the only place to see performance will be the AdWords interface. I personally think that GA is the best place to monitor all traffic sources and all types of conversions, so this may be a challenge as well.

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It would be great if Google decides to offer a comprehensive call tracking solution and disrupt this space, but if you need to track properly all your incoming calls, the right way to do it at the moment is a paid service.

Have you tried call tracking from AdWords? How often your call extensions show up compared to regular ads?

P.S. Got a Google Analytics question? Send it to me and I’ll try to answer it on the blog.