Web analytics is a great way to better understand what your customers want and get more out of your acquisition strategies. To properly analyze your conversions, you need reliable, accurate data collected through a thoughtful, constantly refined methodology. Here are 5 tools our data and analytics specialists use every day to set up data measurement and collection!
1. Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is a free tool from Google that makes it easier to manage the tags used to collect data on your site. Its biggest advantage is how easy it is to use. You don’t need to touch the source code or bring in a web developer. You can make changes directly in the tool’s settings yourself, and GTM takes care of updating the code on your site.
It’s a very handy tool to use day to day since it brings all your tags together in one place, which makes it much simpler to add or update existing tags and set rules for triggering events. You can use ready-made templates or customize your tags however you like.
Overall, Google Tag Manager is a valuable tool that saves you a lot of time. It includes a built-in checker to help you get accurate measurement and cut down on mistakes. It also helps improve your site’s user experience and search ranking, since it speeds up script loading.
GTM works with the whole Google suite, like Google Analytics or Google Ads, which makes it much easier to set these tools up and manage your data and ad campaigns. And since the platform allows several people to access the same account, you can work together with colleagues on shared projects.
2. The Adswerve Data Layer Inspector Extension
Data layers store information about how users interact with a website so that data can be passed along to advertising or analytics platforms, like Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager uses this data to track events and what triggers them through its tags.
The Adswerve data layer inspector extension sits between GTM and the sites it measures, letting you inspect and manage data layers to get a clear, accurate picture of what’s happening inside them. It makes it easier to keep an eye on your measurement setup and catch any errors, like a bug in form submissions.
3. GTM4WP
GTM4WP is a plugin built specifically to measure the results and performance of an online store on a WordPress site in just a few clicks. It automatically creates the data layers needed to track data, so you don’t have to bring in a developer.
Once the plugin is installed, you can move on to setting up GTM on your site and putting your tagging plan in place. You won’t even need to add the GTM container code by hand, the plugin does it for you!
4. ChatGPT
No need for a long introduction here, but in short, ChatGPT is an AI model built by OpenAI that can answer an enormous range of questions in a conversational way and generate original content. The internet is its main source of information, and the software relies on machine learning to keep improving the quality of its answers.
You can use ChatGPT to customize your tags and track your conversions more precisely by asking it to write code snippets you can use in Google Tag Manager, all without needing any deep knowledge of programming. You can also ask it questions, especially if you’re stuck on something more technical and can’t find enough information online to solve your problem. For instance, we once needed to track clicks on a Spotify player embedded in a web page, and ChatGPT walked us through exactly how to do it.
5. A Well-Detailed Tracking Plan in Google Sheets
Even the best tools won’t do you much good if you don’t have a tracking document to refer back to. Before anything else, you need to put together a tracking plan that lays out your entire data collection setup and keeps track of the actions that matter most to your company’s bottom line. This is a necessary step before setting up your tagging plan with GTM.
In practice, the plan works like a dashboard, keeping your goals in view and helping you pull out the right data to make informed, data-driven decisions. Naturally, the tagging plan should evolve over time to focus on the metrics that matter most to your strategy. It needs to spell out both what to measure and how to track it.
To build a solid tracking plan, start by defining your project goals and the KPIs that will help you pinpoint which events to track. From there, you need a clear understanding of your site’s structure and how users move through it before you can map out your tags. You can sort your site’s pages into categories and, for each one, note what needs to be tracked, the triggers involved, and the matching tag name in GTM. That way, it’s much easier to find your way around when it’s time to make changes or dig into the data you’ve collected!
