Many tag vendors will tell you in their documentation that a tag must be placed as high as possible. This ensures that that vendor gets credit for every possible conversion, gets every possible data point.
It’s great for their data accuracy, and they may not really care if it has an impact on your page speed. But we do.
You have to find your balance:
Do you put the tag as high as possible, knowing it may negatively affect user experience by slowing down the page load?
Do you put the tag as low as possible, knowing that if users leave the page quickly, you may never get data about their experience?
Some tags actually DO need to be placed higher. Things that alter the user experience, like Optimization tools, need to have access to the HTML as it is loading. But conversion tags? Are they really worth a potentially slower user experience? It may not matter for one tag here or there, but it adds up!
I don’t think I’ve ever had someone ask me to move the tag up, no matter what the documentation always says. You are the ultimate decision-maker about what tags get deployed, where.
UPDATE, April 2023: To my dismay, I’ve learned that my understanding of GTAG was wrong, therefore much of this post is wrong. I still stand by the statement that you should try to remove duplicate code and libraries where possible, but in the case of GTAG… for every “config” you pass, Google will load a new GTAG library for you, adding weight to your site. So, thanks for that, Google.
This is a “low hanging fruit” best practice, but one that most companies could gain from: consolidate tags from the same vendor. Especially if they load an external JavaScript file. For instance, if I’m deploying both an Adwords GTAG and a Doubleclick GTAG, I might paste them both as custom code:
This means that “https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js” file loads twice. It’s a 40 KB file, with no benefit for loading multiple times.
This code accomplishes the same thing, minus 40 KB of dead weight:
You can take it a step further and consolidate events, too- I don’t need to fire a conversion event twice, I can just add multiple destinations to my send_to variable:
This tip isn’t specific to gtag, though that is one of the tags that I see duplicated the most. Anytime you are deploying two tags from the same vendor on a page, odds are there is some part of that code that doesn’t need to be repeated.
How you name your rules, events/triggers, tags and actions can have a big impact on the health of your TMS. You want to prevent duplicated conditions and logic as much as possible, to keep things simple, lighter, and less error-prone. You want to make things easier to find and easier to put into context.
Launch Rules, Events, Conditions, Data Elements, and ACTIONS
Let’s face it, the internal search functionality in Launch isn’t great. But there is much you can do to make navigation within Launch easier and cut down on duplicated logic.
For rule names, I often follow a format with some combination of the following:
category[: sub category] | trigger | [type (analytics or marketing)] | what the rule does/marketing vendor | load order | consent management category
For example:
add to basket | “add to basket” event | analytics | s.tl | #50 | C0008
search: search results | “page view” event | analytics | set vars | #50 | C0008
Of course, it usually differs for every client depending on their needs. For me, the important thing is for rules with similar events/conditions to be together (all my search rules start with “search:”), to know what triggers it (page bottom? direct call rule?), and to have an idea of what’s inside. Here’s a simpler version:
Having it arranged this way already shows me for this property…. I have a lot of rules firing on that page view event. I could probably consolidate some of those into a single rule. I also see some inconsistency… one “page view” is lacking quotes, which makes the editor in me twitch a bit, and in that top one I didn’t specify s.t or s.tl beacon. But you know what? I can navigate this property pretty easily. And if I see an inconsistency, I can fix it as I go along. Some order is better than none.
Sometimes I only include the event order (eg, #50) if it’s something other than the default of 50. Sometimes we have analytics and marketing in the same rules so the standard has to adapt.
For events, I only change the name from the default if I had to customize it- page bottom is always just “Core – Page Bottom” (unless I changed the order, in which case I’d probably name it “Core – Page Bottom #1” or somesuch), but a direct call rule or something based on a CSS selector should always include that info in the name. For instance “click on .pdf links”, “DCR page view #25” or “payment modal enters viewport”. I won’t even be picky about following a standard… just keep it informative. If you changed the order (from #50 to, say, #1), then do note that. It makes troubleshooting so much easier.
Conditions should always have custom names. “Core – Value Comparison” is just not helpful… but “pageType of ‘search results'” is. Again, I’m not picky about following a standard… just make it so I don’t have to click into the condition to have an idea of what it is.
Action naming… this is where I get excited. Folks don’t take advantage of Action names nearly enough. Action names should include the marketing tag name and the scope. Within a rule, it might look redundant with the rule name (how many times do you see “All pages/Page Top” here) :
But if you search for a tag in the Launch’s search tool, those action names make a world of difference. Let’s say I’m searching for eVar63… this:
…is not helpful (by the way, please go upvote this feature request for better search functionality). I’d have to click in to each of those to find out what the context is to know which one I want to make my change to. But if I’ve added a bit of information to the action name, I can know exactly where it is taking me:
It’s a minor inconvenience when setting rules up, but if you have a complex implementation, it can make life so much easier.
For data elements, I tend to go much simpler. Some sort of categorization, then some sort of detail. If it suits the implementation, I might add more information about the source of the data. For example:
search: term | QP
search: number of results | DL
marketing: cmpid
content id: page name
I tend to always keep it lower case, since you have to have to right case when referencing a data element.
Don’t stop with good names, add even more info!
As I mentioned in my post on governance, it can be extremely helpful to include information about the tag within the tag itself, along these lines:
I’m speaking at the Marketing Analytics Summit about marTech tracking and how to keep tags from causing problems on your site. In true Jenn fashion, I have way more that I want to convey than I can possibly cram into my 30-minute presentation, so I have a series of blog posts to store all the practical takeaways:
A free excel download that shows you how to easily export information about domains on your site from webpagetest.org, then analyzes those domains to show you their impact on your site.
If there is one thing I hope folks take from my presentation, it’s to do something now. You don’t have to wait until you have a ton of resources to do a full audit and clean up. Do what you can, when you can. Implement standards for tagging going forward. Even if it only helps a few tags, your future self will thank you.
If you’re here in Vegas for the Marketing Analytics Summit this week, let me know, I’d love to meet up!
Folks often take for granted that they “must” have analytics and martech tracking and tools on their site. And that may be true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize the impact… because it DOES have an impact. I looked at the home pages of 5 brands from the top of the Fortune 500, and found that:
On average, 35% of the page weight was for MarTech. (Note, this does include stuff beyond just conversion pixels… it’s tag managers, optimization tools, analytics, consent management… some of which may improve the user experience, but none of which is required for the site to function.) For the Telecom site, literally half of the site weight was marTech!
Tag Manager Containers alone can carry a lot of weight- for the Energy site I looked at, it was 15% of the site’s total weight! I mention this in my post about TMS Best Practices, but an EMPTY Google Tag Manager container weighs 30-40 kilobytes (not to compare, because weight-when-empty isn’t the most useful measure, but an empty Adobe Launch library is 9 KB). If you add a single Google Adwords Conversion tag using GTM’s Tag Template, that adds another 20 KB. That’s more than any script on my site, including the whole jQuery library. A “full” TMS library can easily be the “heaviest” single asset on a page.
All that marTech tagging also means a lot of different domains are contributing something as the page loads. The Media site I looked at had almost 200 different third-party domains adding their script, pixels or iframes to the page.
MarTech DOES impact page speed in a way that. That media site had a speed index of 13.2 seconds for a mobile device (meaning it took about 13 seconds before the majority of VISIBLE content on the site was loaded.)
See the impact of your TMS on YOUR site with Chrome Developer Tools
If you want to get a quick sense of the impact marTech has on your site, there is an easy way to do it using the Chrome Developer console. I find the easiest way to get to the Dev Console is to right-click anywhere on a page and choose “inspect” (you can also do Ctrl+Shift+J on Windows or Ctrl+Option+J on a Mac). Once in there, go to the network tab (#1) and find your main TMS container file. You can use a filter (#2) to get to it quickly: adobedtm.com or launch for Launch, googletagmanager.com or gtm for GTM, or utag for Tealium. Right click on the first file that matches that filter (#3), and select “Block Request URL” (#4):
This essentially gives you an “ON/OFF” switch for your TMS:
You can load any page on your site with your TMS “on”, as it is for all your users, then turn your TMS “off” and see the difference in load times and amount of files and weight on your site. The “DOMContentLoaded” and “Load” numbers at the bottom of the network window are good ones to watch, since they show the amount of time for the main structure of your site to be built, and the time for images and other content to load.
Do make sure you’re comparing apples to apples- either use a fresh incognito window for each load, or click the “Disable Cache” checkbox in the network tab (#5 in the graphic above).
For example, with the TMS in place, this particular site I tested took 3.5 seconds to load, and had 54 files (“requests”) with a total weight of 3.2 MB. (I tend to ignore the “KB transferred” and “Finish” numbers for reasons not worth going into).
After I “blocked” the TMS, those DOMContentLoaded and Load times went down considerably:
This isn’t a perfect science- every time a user loads a page they’ll get slightly different times depending on device, bandwidth, server response times, and caching- but it can give you a quick sense of how much your marTech and analytics scripts have on your site. If you want to take it a step further, you can use this “Request Blocking” trick while running a lighthouse test directly in your dev console:
Get deeper insight on the impact on your site with webpagetest.org and my marTech Governance and Impact template
If you want to dig deeper, I’ve developed an Excel template that uses webpagetest.org to export then analyze the domains that load resources on your site:
Deeper instructions are in the template itself, but at a high level: run a webpagetest.org scan of a page on your site- for instance, I ran a scan on marketingAnalyticsSummit.com. Once the scan has run, grab the URL and paste it in to cell B1, just for safekeeping (you can always refer back to it later). The “good stuff” is on the Domain tab, but if you’re interesting in overall metrics on the main page, you can throw this script in your developer console:
document.querySelectorAll("#tableResults tr")[0].remove() //clean up the table so we can copy the whole table but get only the row we care about
document.querySelectorAll("#tableResults tr")[0].remove()
copy(document.getElementById("tableResults")) //copy the table to your clipboard
document.location.href=document.location.href //refresh the page so you get the full table back
Then paste into cell A4 in the template (it’s bright yellow) to fill out this handy little table:
Next go to the domains portion of the scan:
Here you can see a nice view of all the different domains loading resources on your page.
In general, you can use the process of elimination to figure out what is from a marTech vendor… in most cases, if it isn’t a domain you own, it’s marTech (not always, but… often enough). Figuring out which marTech vendor can be a bit trickier. I mean, www.linkedin.com is pretty obvious, but LinkedIn also fires resources from licdn.com.
Over time, I’ve collected a mapping of domains to vendors that we’re making publicly available. It will never going to be comprehensive (the list of 9900+ marTech vendors is ever growing and changing) but it can at least serve as a starting point. If you have changes or additions, you can throw them on the un-curated (and publicly editable) version. Anyway, once you are on the Domains Breakdown part of your scan results, you can put this code into the developer console to copy the table on the right to your clipboard:
Then paste the result into cell A12 of the excel template (it’s red), which will fill out the table and allow it to check if domains match our list of known domain/vendor mappings, then summarize what it finds:
For instance, here we find that marketinganalyticssummit.com’s home page weight is 26% marTech (and 8% TMS). It’s a very light site to begin with, so 26% of not much is…. not much. But it’s interesting to see how much is going on behind the scenes, even on “light” pages.
Now that you’ve established a high-level view of marTech’s impact on your site, you may want to dive deeper and do a tag audit… I’ve got tips and tricks for how!
Often, an agency will ask you to add another tag container to your site. This is especially true if you’re on Adobe Launch, which many agencies aren’t as comfortable with as GTM. There are two reasons to NOT a second tag container to your site:
1. Impact to Page Performance. TMS files and extensions/tag templates do have some inherent weight to them- code that must be run on every page so that the TMS knows what other code to bring in. An empty GTM container with no tags, triggers, or variables in it, is around 33 KB. If you add a single Google Adwords conversion pixel using the Adwords Tag Template, that adds another 20 KB. An entirely empty Adobe Launch library is nearly 10KB. Once you start adding rules and tags, a TMS can easily become one of the single heaviest assets on many sites.
2. Loss of Control. Let’s say you notice a “clarity.js” file throwing an error on your site, but to your knowledge you aren’t deploying anything called clarity.js. If you’re spread between two Tag Management containers, it can be hard enough to establish that no one is deploying that tag directly. Once you track down that that file is being deployed by Bing, you need to find all the Bing tags and disable or modify them, and you need to do it quickly to get rid of that error. That kind of agility and knowledge of your own ecosystem becomes very difficult if you’re spread between tools. You should have one point of entry for tags to your site, and you should watch that entry point carefully.
Sometimes, adding a second tag container is unavoidable, but it should never be done without thinking about the risks.
This is part of a series of blog posts on keeping marTech tags from becoming a problem on your site. See the preceding post (which serves as the “table of contents”) or following post on the impact that marTech has on your site.
The health of your website depends on the health of your marTech ecosystem, which is decided by a combination of the following:
The number of tags on your site. I’d say most companies I work with have between a dozen and 150 tags on their site, though I have seen it go as high as 1500. Each additional tag adds a little to the weight and complexity of your marTech implementation.
The age of the tags on your site. This matters both because you want the most updated versions of tags, which play best with modern browsers and current regulations, but also because the older the tag, the less likely there is someone out there still getting value out of it. A few weeks ago I came across an Adwords gtag from 2018. No one had any record of it, or any idea who might be using it. And instead of that meaning they could safely delete it, it meant they didn’t know who to ask permission of to delete it, so they left in place “for now” and just keep piling tags on top. It adds up.
The complexity of your Tag Management System. Duplicate rule triggers/conditions, repeated logic, poor naming, unnecessary complexity… these all can make an ecosystem unmaintainable. We’ve seen good technical employees leave companies because they felt they were spending all their time deploying tags that weren’t providing value, or worse yet, felt they were tasked with keeping a sinking ship afloat. These issues can all make a TMS library unnecessarily heavy (in another post, I show how one site I looked at had 15% of its site weight come just from the TMS library… not the tags, but the library itself… you know, the part that has to load on every page.)
Documentation. Every site has quirks, workarounds, edge cases, and places where the implementation had to do something unanticipated. And every implementor has their own way of doing things. If you don’t have documentation, then every small change to your implementation has the potential to bring the whole thing tumbling down.
Resource Turnover. This goes hand-in-hand with documentation. The more fingers you have in the pie (or cooks in the kitchen… whichever metaphor resonates), the higher the possibility of conflicts. The messiest implementations I see are the ones that have changed hands many times.
And these problems build on themselves: if you don’t have a place to put documentation, no one is going to document things. If someone new goes into your TMS to put a new tag on purchase confirmation, and they see eight rules that look like they could all be for purchase confirmation, they may very well make a ninth rule that they know is what they need. The whole ecosystem can slowly spiral out of control until it’s no longer sustainable.
Why ecosystem health matters: Security
Some tags inherently carry a bit of risk. Anything that allows a third party to change the code on your site has the potential for trouble. For a while a few years back, Doubleclick for Publishers had a known cross-site scripting vulnerability that could allow malicious parties to inject script onto a site. Even now, agencies can (and do) use Google Ad Manager to deploy tracking scripts.
Many tags allow other tags to “piggy back” on them. For instance, if you had a Bing tag on your site last November (2021), you may or may not have noticed a new ~23KB file, clarity.js, loading on your site. The only reason my client noticed it is that it was causing JavaScript errors on their site. Since “clarity.js” wasn’t something we ever put in place, it took some tracking down to figure out that it was tied to our Bing tag. Apparently Microsoft had rolled out an “Automatic Clarity Integration” for anyone with an existing Bing/UET tag. Once we figured out where it was coming from, we had to quickly find all our Bing tags and disable them until we figured out how to disable the automatic Clarity integration.
Why ecosystem health matters: Fragility
Even if the tag vendor doesn’t have inherent security risks or files piggybacking on it, an unhealthy ecosystem still leaves you open to JavaScript errors, which can mean lost tracking or, worse yet, ruined user experiences. I’ve seen tag conflicts take down the rest of the TMS (meaning no analytics until it was fixed), and I’ve seen a poorly deployed Doubleclick iframe turn a checkout flow into a blank white screen (lesson learned: don’t use document.write to deploy iframes). The more tags you have, the older your tags, the more undocumented your tags, the more likely you are to run into problems like this eventually.
Why ecosystem health matters: Consumer Trust
An ever-increasing amount of (negative, fear-mongering) attention is being paid to cookies, data sharing, retargeting, and third-party tracking scripts. For instance, if a user is using Safari on their desktop, they’ll see this shield next to the URL bar, which shows them all the “bad, scary” trackers that Safari is “saving” them from:
It doesn’t add any nuance, of “this tag is monetizing you and will follow you around the internet with targeted ads that you’ll think are creepy” vs “that tag is used for first-party analytics, which improves your user experience without any harm to you at all”. Users ARE paying attention to who you are sharing their data with (even if they don’t really know what they’re afraid of.)
Why ecosystem health matters: Privacy Regulation Compliance
Privacy regulations such as the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which is a pretty good representative of various laws in the US, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, are constantly changing (or at least, they way they are interpreted and enforced is constantly changing). For instance, if you’re in the EU and have users in Austria, and Austria suddenly decides that Google tracking is no longer GDPR-compliant (and therefore “illegal”), how quickly could you disable or update all of your Google tags so you could be compliant with confidence? Many companies would really struggle with that.
Why ecosystem health matters: Site Speed
The main thing folks think of when they think of Tag Bloat is the effect on site speed. There is an incredible amount of data out there showing that site speed affects conversion rates. I had a hard time choosing between studies, because there are just so many that have found things like:
Mobify found that decreasing their homepage’s load time by 100 milliseconds resulted in a 1.11% uptick in session-based conversion
Retailer AutoAnything experienced a 12-13% increase in sales after cutting page load time in half
Walmart discovered that improving page load time by one second increased conversions by 2%
Site speed is also a direct ranking factor in SEO (and an indirect ranking factor, if users bounce or spend less time on your site because of the slow user experience).
Folks often discount the impact that marTech tracking has on site speed. It’s ironic that the technology we use to measure site success can actually decrease site success. Every now and then the SEO team or IT may come to the Analytics and Marketing folks and say “that TMS library is too heavy and causes all our problems”, and there may be some cleanup, and usually some back and forth, before it’s ultimately decided “sorry, we HAVE to have tracking. Leadership gave us their stamp of approval”. And that may be true, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t minimize the impact, because (as I discuss in my next post), it does have an impact…
I’m presenting as part of a Rockstar Tips & Tricks session at Adobe’s Virtual Summit this year- if you’re registered, you’ll eventually able to view the recordings on-demand. But in case folks miss it or want more detail, this post walks though the tips/tricks I’m presenting. With the old Reports & Analytics (R&A) reports going away, I want to look at some of the cool fallout and pathing things we can still do in workspace.
Note, I do think this will all make more sense in a video demo than in a blog post, but I know the presentation went pretty fast, so this post can be a sort of supplemental guide for the video demo.
TL;DR
If you’re coming from my presentation and just want that way under-used TEXTJOIN excel formula from the end of Tip #2, here you go:
=TEXTJOIN(">",TRUE,A13:E13)
Also, in case I didn’t make it clear in my presentation (I didn’t), I recommend this Pivot Table filter to get to Full Paths: descending, by “Sum of Path views”, filtering on “Complete Path contains Exits”.
If that makes no sense to you, or you just want the full context, read on:
Tip #1: Fallout and Funnels
In the old R&A days, I had a few ways to track a conversion flow fallout:
The Custom Events Funnel gave a nice little graphical interface to compare numbers in. You could drag in events (no dimensions) to see them in a funnel.
A few things to note, though: first, the graphic did not change based on the data, so it could be misleading. Second, it didn’t actually pay attention to if the user did the events in sequence (notice in my screenshot that I have zero checkouts because I forgot to set it, yet 60 orders). Really, it was just a way to compare difference between events, regardless of sequence.
There was also a fallout report in R&A, which could be built off of pageName or any prop that you had the foresight to have pathing enabled on. (At least its graphic matches the data.)
Both of these are replaced in Workspace by the Flow visualization, which can be used for events (like an old Events Funnel):
Or on page names (or any other dimension- not restricted to pathing props):
This is already showing more flexibility and power than the old R&A pathing reports. But you could also mix and match events and dimensions. Let’s say I have a new campaign with 4 marketing landing pages and I want to see how those 4 pages collectively affect my Fallout. Because I’m setting page type in an eVar (which I consider essential to any implementation), I can bring in the page type to represent all four of those pages together, then continue the funnel based on page name:
I could pull events, props, and eVars all into the same report and see them in sequence and the fallout between. But I can take that a step farther and drop dimensions and segments into the area below the visualization key , where it that currently says “all visitors”, to compare how the fallout looks for just that dimension or segment. For instance, if I now want to compare those four pages, I can:
(Note, the top step has 100% for each dimension value because of course 100% of the visits with that page type have that page type.)
This visualization helps me spot something pretty immediately: the marketing page represented by the purple (sorry the names get cut off in the screenshot so you can’t see my Harry Potter references) got by far the most visits (75), but had the worst fallout. Whereas the one in pink had far viewer visits but much better retention. I’d probably go to the marketing or content team and see if we could get the best of both worlds somehow: whatever we’re doing to GET people to the purple marketing page, plus whatever content is on the pink one that seems to be getting people to STAY.
That’s just one made-up example, but there are so many ways this could be used. Let me know if you’ve found other fun ways.
Tip #2: Full Path Report and the Flow Visualization
One thing that Reports and Analytics for which Workspace doesn’t have a direct equivalent are the Full Path and Pathfinder reports. The Full Path report would show, well, the most popular full paths that users took through the site, from entry to exit:
Personally, I didn’t see a ton of value in this report because it would be so granular… if one visitor went page a>b>c>d, and another did just b>c>d, and another just a>b>c, they’d all appear as different line items in the report. However, I do know some folks like to include this in dashboards and such. But in my mind, most of the insight/analysis would be done in a Path Finder report. This helpful little tool would let you specify certain flows and patterns you were interested in, leaving room for filling in the blanks. The Bookends Pattern was a particular favorite: what happened between point A and point B? This would help analysts see unexpected user paths.
This is the functionality that currently workspace can’t directly replace. The closest we get is a flow visualization…. which may very well be my favorite Workspace tool. I should write another post about all the lesser-known great things about this report (segments! trends! pretty-and-useful colors!), but for now I’m going to focus on turning it into a full path report.
First, I bring Page in as an entry dimension. At this point, it should just be showing me my top entry pages. Since I want a more complete story, I’m going to click the “+_ more” so it includes more pages, then I’m going to right-click on that column and tell it to “Expand Entire Column”:
That’ll add a second column. I’ll keep repeating this process until I have 5 or 6 columns as expanded as can be.
Unfortunately, you probably don’t want to expand columns too deep or too far to the right because after a while Workspace starts slowing down and struggling. So this won’t cover all paths but it will help us get the most common ones.
With all of the winding and webbing between pages, it’s still hard to get at that list of paths…. for that, I need to take the report to Excel. So I send the report to myself as a CSV (either through Project>Download CSV, or Share>Send File Now). This gives me something like this:
It’s not quite useful yet. And something kinda odd happens, where it shows me all possible combinations of paths, even ones that never happened (all the lines that don’t have a number in the “Path views” column.) But that’s ok, we can ignore those for now. What I am going to do is create a new column to the right, and put this formula in it:
=TEXTJOIN(">",TRUE,A13:E13)
(Where A13:E13 are the cells of that row that contain all of my steps).
Then I copy that formula all the way down. This gives me a single string with complete paths, like “Entry (Page)>home>internal search>product details:skiving snackboxes>checkout:view cart>Exits”. I’ll also throw a name at the top of that column like “Complete Paths”.
This still isn’t really great for analysis, so I take it one step farther, and create a pivot table by selecting all the cells in my “Path Views” and “Complete Paths” columns (except for the empty ones up top), then going to the “Insert” tab in excel and clicking “Pivot Table”:
This will create a new sheet with an empty pivot table. I’ll set up my Pivot Table Fields with “Complete Paths” as my rows and “Sum of Path Views” as my values:
Then I’ll sort it, descending, by “Sum of Path views”, filtering on “Complete Path contains Exits” (otherwise you get incomplete portions of journeys, as the download will show the path “entry>a>b>c>exit” as “entry>a”, “entry>a>b”, “entry>a>b>c”, and “entry>a>b>c>exit”).
And there we go! A very rough approximation of Full Paths.
But there are a some nuances and caveats here, the main one being that it only goes so deep. The Flow Visualization really starts struggling when you have too many fully expanded columns, and the downloaded CSV reflects only the number of columns you had in the visualization. So paths that are longer than than the 4-6 columns are going to be excluded. Accordingly, this is ideally used for most common paths (which usually aren’t more than 5 or 6 pages anyway).
So this shows Full Paths, but where does that Path Finder stuff come in? Really, I’d expect this to serve as a starting point for a lot of further analysis in excel, where you can use filters to find the paths that interest you most (eg “begins with” or “ends with”). Hopefully before R&A goes away, Adobe will have some way to truly replicate that Path Finder functionality, but in the meantime, this at lease gives you some options. If you have a specific use case you want to achieve and don’t know how, leave a comment here or find me on #measure slack or twitter, and I’d love to help you figure it out.
If nothing else, now more of the world will know about how handy TEXTJOIN is ;).
This is a bit anticlimactic of a post, for my triumphant return after a long while of not blogging, but this question keeps coming up so I figured I’d document it publicly so I can reference it when needed. I find many of my posts that are for my own benefit, to use as a reference, tend to be the most viewed posts, so here’s Jenn’s notes to herself about converting Doubleclick tags to gtag:
Quick Reference
If you’re generally familiar with gtag and the old Doubleclick/Floodlight/Search Ads 360 tags, and just want a quick reminder of the order of things, here is the format of the send_to variable, inspired by Google’s documentation:
‘send_to’ : ‘DC-[floodlightConfigID (src)]/[activityGroupTagString (type)]/[activityTagString (cat)]+[countingMethod-either conversion or purchase]
That’s src, type, and cat pulled from these spots:
If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, you need more examples, or you just want to understand it better, read on.
Walkthrough
Doubleclick’s standard tag used to look something like this (sometimes using an img instead of an iframe, but the same general idea either way):
<!--
Start of Floodlight Tag: Please do not remove
Activity name of this tag: Jenn-Kunz-Example-Tag
URL of the webpage where the tag is expected to be placed: https://www.digitaldatatactics.com/
This tag must be placed between the <body> and </body> tags, as close as possible to the opening tag.
Creation Date: 08/18/2021
-->
<script type="text/javascript">
var axel = Math.random() + "";
var a = axel * 10000000000000;
document.write('<iframe src="https://12345678.fls.doubleclick.net/activityi;src=12345678;type=myagency;cat=jkunz_001;dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=;npa=;gdpr=${GDPR};gdpr_consent=${GDPR_CONSENT_755};ord=' + a + '?" width="1" height="1" frameborder="0" style="display:none"></iframe>');
</script>
<noscript>
<iframe src="https://12345678.fls.doubleclick.net/activityi;src=12345678;type=myagency;cat=jkunz_001;dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=;npa=;gdpr=${GDPR};gdpr_consent=${GDPR_CONSENT_755};ord=1?" width="1" height="1" frameborder="0" style="display:none"></iframe>
</noscript>
<!-- End of Floodlight Tag: Please do not remove -->
Some agencies/deployments still use this format. You may get a request from an agency or marketer to deploy a tag documented this way. But if you already use gtag on your site, or you just want to modernize and take advantage of gtag, you can convert these old iframe tags into gtag by just mapping a few values.
Before you get started, you need to note a few things from your original tag:
1. The “src”, also known as your account ID. 2. The “type”, also known as a “Activity Group Tag String” 3. The “category”, also known as the “Activity Tag String”
Keep track of these, we’ll use them in a moment. (If you also have custom dimensions or revenue and such, hang on, we’ll get to those in a bit.)
Step 1. Global Site Tag code
First, make sure you have gtag code on your site. No matter how many tags use it, you only need to reference it once.
Note, I’m only walking through the code; if you’re in Launch, using a tool like Acronym’s Google Site Tag extension (which is great, in my opinion), hopefully this post combined with their documentation will be enough to get you what you need to know.
<!--
Start of global snippet: Please do not remove
Place this snippet between the <head> and </head> tags on every page of your site.
-->
<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Marketing Platform -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=DC-12345678"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'DC-12345678');
</script>
<!-- End of global snippet: Please do not remove -->
The part that matters, that establishes which gtag accounts you want to set up, is in the config:
This is where you’d put #1- Your Account ID. Add a “DC-” to the front of it (DC for Doubleclick, as opposed to AW for AdWords…), and you have your config ID.
Step 2. Send an event
With that, you have the gtag library on your page, and you’ve configured it. But this merely “primes” your tracking…. it sets it up, but does not actually send the information you want. For that, you need to convert your original iframey tag into a gtag event. A traditional gtag event looks like this:
<!--
Event snippet for Jenn-Kunz-Example-Tag-Home-Page on https://www.digitaldatatactics.com: Please do not remove.
Place this snippet on pages with events that you’re tracking.
Creation date: 08/19/2021
-->
<script>
gtag('event', 'conversion', {
'allow_custom_scripts': true,
'send_to': 'DC-12345678/myagency/jkunz_001+standard'
});
</script>
<noscript>
<img src=""https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/activity/src=12345678;type=myagency;cat=jkunz_001;dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=;tfua=;npa=;gdpr=${GDPR};gdpr_consent=${GDPR_CONSENT_755};ord=1?"" width=""1"" height=""1"" alt=""""/>
</noscript>
<!-- End of event snippet: Please do not remove -->
But the part we need (and the only part that actually sends info to google) is just this:
So this in your original iFrame/pixel Doubleclick tag:
Becomes this for gtag:
There are two other things to pay attention to in that gtag event, and they don’t map directly to something in your original tag:
(Note, the “allow_custom_scripts” will always be true, so you don’t need to worry about it.)
The event type (“conversion”) and the counting method (“+standard”) will reflect whether or not your tag is for a purchase or not. For the Counting Method, Google says:
Standard counts every conversion by every user. This is the counting method for action activities generated in Search Ads 360.
Transactions counts the number of transactions that take place, and the cost of each transaction. For example, if a user visits your website and buys five books for a total of €100, one conversion is recorded with that monetary value. This is the counting method for transaction activities generated in Search Ads 360.
Unique counts the first conversion for each unique user during each 24-hour day, from midnight to midnight, Eastern Time (US).
In other words, most cases will be “conversion”/”+standard”, unless you’re tracking a purchase, in which case it will be “purchase”/”+transaction”. If your original tag has cost and qty in it, then it’s a purchase, otherwise, it’s likely just a conversion and you can use “+standard” as your counting method. On a rare occasion, you may be asked to use “+unique” so the conversion only counts once per day. I hear there may be other counting methods, but I don’t have examples of them.
If your tag is a conversion and you’re not sending custom variables, then the allow_custom_scripts and the send_to is all you need- you’re done! If it is a transaction and/or you have custom variables, read on.
Transactions
If your original iframey tag is intended for a purchase confirmation page, it probably includes a “qty”, “cost” and “ord”, with the intent for you to dynamically fill these in based on the user’s transaction:
If so, then your gtag will need a few more things, like value and transaction_id (and make sure your event type is “purchase” instead of “conversion”) :
The mapping for these is probably fairly obvious. What was “cost” goes into “value”; what was “ord” goes into “transaction_id”:
Quantity seems to have fallen by the wayside; the old iframey tags asked for it but I’ve never seen it in a gtag purchase tag.
Maybe it could go without saying, but to be clear, the expectation is that you’d dynamically fill in those values in square brackets. So if you’re in Launch, it might look like this:
Again, the expectation is that you would replace anything in square brackets with dynamic values that reflect the user’s experience. I often leave the description they provided in comments, just for reference and to make sure I’m putting stuff in the right places.
You may be wondering about some of the other bits of code in the original iframey tag:
The “axel” stuff was a cache buster, to prevent the browser from loading the iframe or img once, then pull it from cache for later views. The cache buster would generate a new random number on every page load, so to the browser it looked like a new file rather than the file it has in its cache. The good news is, gtag handles cache busting, as well as all that other stuff for you; it’s not needed any longer. Gtag also handles GDPR differently so you don’t need to carry those parameters over.
NoScript
A quick word about the noscript tags:
These are a remnant of an older internet, where mobile devices didn’t run JavaScript, and tag management systems didn’t exist. It says “if the user doesn’t run JavaScript, then run this HTML instead”, usually followed by a hard-coded pixel.
Frankly, it’s comical that anyone includes these anywhere anymore:
These days, the only devices not running JavaScript are bots. Unless you WANT inflated numbers (maybe some agencies/vendors do), you don’t want bot traffic.
Sometimes vendors/agencies will ask for dynamic values within the noscript tag: Which is just silly- without JavaScript, the only way to dynamically set those values would be to have them set serverside. Which I’ve never seen anyone do.
Finally… if you’re deploying it through a Tag Management System, and the user isn’t running JavaScript, the TMS won’t run at all, meaning the rule won’t fire, meaning the noscript tag will never get a chance to be written.
In short, delete noscript tags and their contents. Some agencies may not know these not-exactly-rocket-science nuances of the internet, and may whine at you about not including the noscript tag because they have a very specific checklist to follow. Include it if you must to appease the whiners, but… know that if it’s within a TMS, the contents of that noscript tag will never see the light of day.
How to send to multiple accounts
This isn’t tied directly to converting from old tags, but for reference…. if you want to send a gtag event to multiple accounts, instead of duplicating the tag, you can add a config in your global code:
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=DC-12345678"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'DC-12345678');
gtag('config', 'DC-87654321');
</script>
Then in your event code, turn the “send_to” into an array:
You may ask “If I only need to have the gtag library script once, and I have multiple gtags, what do I do about this id on the global script src?”
To be honest, that bit matters very little. I usually just delete it, or leave it with whatever ID was on the first gtag I added (if someone knows what purpose that ID serves and wants to tell me I shouldn’t be deleting it, please chime in). The “configs” are the important part.
Conclusion
It’s not exactly cutting-edge content, nor relaxing bedside reading, but I hope this comes in handy for those for those struggling to find answers in existing documentation. Cheers!
Disclaimer: I’m not a Doubleclick expert, but I have deployed many many Doubleclick tags- I daresay hundreds of them. If any of the above isn’t “gospel truth”, it’s “truth that worked for me”, but I’d love to hear if any of my reasoning/theories are incorrect or incomplete.
Almost every organization that uses Digital Analytics has some combination of the following documents:
Business Requirements Document
Solution Design Reference/Variable Map
Technical Specifications
Validation Specifications/QA Requirements
All of the consulting agencies use them and may even have their own special, unique versions of them. They’re often heavily branded and may be closely guarded. And it can be very difficult to find a template or example as a starting point.
In my 11 years as a consultant who focuses on Digital Analytics implementation, I’ve been through MANY documentation templates. I’ve used the (sometimes vigorously enforced) templates provided by whoever was my current employing agency; I’ve used client’s existing docs; I’ve created and recreated my own templates dozens of times. I’ve used Word documents, Google Sheets, txt/js documents, Confluence/Wiki pages, and (much to my chagrin) Powerpoint presentations (there’s nothing wrong with Powerpoint for presentations, but it really isn’t a technical documentation tool). I’ve in turn shared out templates and examples both within agencies and more broadly in the industry, and I’ve now decided it’s time to stop hoarding documentation templates and examples, and share them publicly in a git repo, starting with the most foundational: the Variable Map (sometimes called a Solution Design Reference, or SDR).
The Variable Map
You may or may not have a tech spec or a business requirements document, but I bet you have a document somewhere that lays out the mapping of your custom dimensions and metrics. Since Adobe Analytics has up to 250 custom eVars, 75 custom props, and up to 1000 custom events, it’s practically essential to have a variable map. In fact, the need for a quick reference is why I created the PocketSDR app a few years ago (shameless plug) so you could use your phone to check what a variable was used for or what its settings are. But when planning/maintaining an implementation, you need a global view of all your variables. This isn’t a new idea: Adobe’s documentation discusses it at a higher level, Chetan Gaikwad covered it on his blog more recently, Jason Call blogged about this back in 2016, Analytics Demystified walked through it in 2015, and even back in 2014, Numeric Analytics discussed the importance of an SDR. Yet if you want a template, example, or starting point, you still generally have to ask colleagues and friends to pass you one under the table, use one from a previous role/org, or you just start from scratch. This is why 33 Sticks is making a generic SDR publicly available on our git repo.
The cats out of the bag
There are various reasons folks (including me) haven’t done this in the past. For practitioners, there is (understandably) a hesitance to share what you are doing- you might not want your brand to be associated with how good/not good your documentation is, and/or you may not want to give your competitors any “help” (more on that in an upcoming podcast). For agencies, there may be a desire to not show “the man behind the curtain”, or they may believe (or at least want their clients to believe) that their documentation is special and unique.
So why am I sharing it?
Because I don’t think the format of my variable map is actually all that special- a variable map is a variable map (but that doesn’t mean we should all have to start from scratch every time). This isn’t intended to be the end-all-be-all of SDRs, but rather, as a starting point or an example for comparison. Any aspect of it might be boring/obvious to you, overkill, or just not useful, but my hope is that there is at least a part of it that will be helpful.
Because while I DO think I have some tricks that make my SDRs easier to use, I recognize that most of those tricks are things I only know or do because someone in the industry has shared their knowledge with me, or a client let me experiment a bit to find what worked best.
Because 33 Sticks doesn’t bill by the hour and I have no incentive to hoard “easy”/low-level tasks from my clients. If a client comes to me and says “I used your blog post to get started on an SDR without you”, I can say, “Great! That leaves us more time to get into more strategic work!”
Because where I can REALLY offer value as a consultant isn’t in the formatting/data entry part of creating an SDR, but rather, in the thought we put into designing/documenting solutions, and in how we help clients focus on goals and getting long-term value out of data so they don’t get stuck in “maintenance mode.”
And finally, because I’m hoping to hear back from folks and learn from them about what they’re doing the same or differently. We all benefit from opening up about our techniques.
Enough with the pedantry, let’s get back to discussing how to create a good SDR.
SDR Best Practices
It’s vitally important you keep your variable map in a centrally-accessible location. If I update a copy of the SDR on my hard drive, that doesn’t benefit anyone but me, and by the time I merge it back into the “global” one, we may already have conflicts.
It should go without saying, but keeping it updated is also a good idea. I actually view most types of Digital Analytics documentation as fitting into one of two categories: primarily useful at the beginning of an implementation, OR an ongoing, living document. Something like a Business Requirements Document COULD be a living document, but let’s be honest: its primary value is in designing the solution, and it can have a high level of effort to keep it comprehensively up-to-date. Technical specifications for the data layer are usually a one-time deal: after it is implemented, it goes into an archive somewhere. But the simple variable map… THAT absolutely should be kept current and frequently referenced.
Tools for Creation/Tracking
If you’re already using Adobe Analytics, then you probably need to get an accurate and current list of your variables and their settings. Even if you have an SDR, you should check if it matches what’s set up in your Analytics tool. You could always export your settings from within the Admin Console, but I’ve found the format makes the output very difficult to use. I’d recommend going with one of the many other great industry tools (all of which are free):
Adobe Consulting has a Health Dashboard that uses the Admin and Reporting APIs to not only pull down your settings, but show you the top values for each report and highlights recent changes in data.
If you use the Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger chrome extension and are logged in to the Experience Cloud, it will show you the friendly names of your variables directly in your beacon.
These tools are great for getting your existing settings, but they don’t leave a lot of room for planning and documenting the full implementation aspects of your solution, so usually I use these as a source to copy my existing settings into my SDR.
What should an SDR contain?
On our git repo, you’ll see an Excel sheet that has a generic example Variable Map. Even if you have an SDR that you like already, take a look this example one- there may be some items you might get use of (plus this post will be much more interesting if you can see the columns I’m talking about).
Pretty much ALL Variable Maps have the following columns (and mine is no different):
Variable/Report Name (eg, “Internal Search Terms”)
Variable/Report Number (eg, “eVar1”)
Description
Example Value
Variable Settings
But over the years I’ve found a few other columns can really make the variable map much more use-able and useful (and again, this all may make more sense if you download our SDR to have an example):
A “Sorting Order” or Key
If, like me, you love using tables, sorting, and filtering in Excel, you may discover that Excel doesn’t know how to sort eVars, props and events: because it isn’t fully a number or string, it thinks that the proper order is “eVar1, eVar10, eVar2, eVar20”. So if you’ve sorted for some small task and want to get back to a sensible order, you pretty much have to do things manually. For this reason, I have a simple column that has nothing other than numbers indicating my ideal/proper/default order for my table.
Param
This is for those who live their lives in analytics beacons rather than reports, like a QA team. It’s nice to know that s.campaign is the variable, and it is named “Tracking Code” in the reports, but it’s not exactly obvious that if you’re looking in a beacon, the value for s.campaign shows in the “v0” parameter.
Variable Type
Again, I love me some Excel filtering, and I like being able to say “show me just my eVars” or “show the out of the box events”. It can also be handy for those not used to Adobe lingo (“what the heck is an eVar?”). So I have a column with something like the following possible values:
eVar- custom conversion dimension
event- custom metric (eg “event1”)
event- predefined metric (eg “scAdd”, “purchase”)
listVar- custom conversion dimension list (eg, “s.list1”)
For things like this, where I have specific values I’ll be using repeatedly, I’ll keep an extra tab in the workbook titled “worksheet config”. Then I can use Excel’s “data validation” to pull a drop-down list from that tab.
Category
This is my personal favorite- I use it every day. It’s a way to sort/group variables and metrics that are related to each other- eg, if you are using eVar1, eVar2, prop1, event1, and event2 all in some way to track internal search, it’s nice to be able to filter by this column and get something like this:
The categories themselves are completely arbitrary and don’t need to map to anything outside of the document (though you might choose to use them in your Tech Spec or even in workspaces). Here’s a standard list I might use:
Content Identification
Internal Search
Products
Checkout
Visitor Segmentation
Traffic Sources
Authentication
Validation/Troubleshooting
Again, I could create/maintain this list in a single place on my “worksheet config” tab, then use “Data Validation” to turn it into a drop-down list in my Variable Map.
Status
This basically answers the question “is this variable currently expected to be working in production?” I usually have three possible values:
Implemented
Broken (or some euphemism for broken, like “needs work”)
In progress
Data Quality Notes
This is for, well, notes on Data Quality. Such as “didn’t track for month of March” or “has odd values coming from PDP”.
Last Validated
This is to keep track of how recently someone checked on the health of this variable/metric. The hope is this will help prevent variables sitting around, unused, with bad data, for months or even years. I even add conditional formatting so if it has been more than 90 days, it turns red.
Scope
Where would I expect to see this variable/metric? Is it set globally? Or maybe it happens on all cart adds?
Description
I’m certainly not unique in having this column, and I’m probably not unique in how many SDRs I’ve seen where this column has not been kept up-to-date. I’d like to stress the importance of this column, though- you may think the purpose of a variable is obvious, but almost every company I’ve worked with has at least one item on their variable map where no current member of the analytics team has any idea what the original goal was.
Ideally, the contents of this column would align with the “Description” setting within the Admin Console for each variable, so that folks viewing the reports can understand how to use the data.
We ARE all setting and using those descriptions, right? RIGHT?
Logic/Formatting and Example Value
Your Variable Map needs to have a place to detail the type of values you’d expect in this report. This:
helps folks looking at the document to understand what each variable does (especially if you don’t have stellar descriptions)
lets developers/implementers know what sort of data to send in
provides a place to make sure values are consistent. For instance, if I have a variable for “add to cart location”, there’s no inherent reason why the value “product details page” would be more correct than “product view”… but I still only want to see ONE of those values in my report. If folks can look in my variable map and see that “product details page” is the value already in use, they won’t go and invent a new value for the same thing).
I often find it a good exercise to run the Adobe Consulting Health Dashboard and grab the top few values from each variable to fill out this column.
Source Type
What method are we using to get the value for the data layer? I usually use Excel Data Validation to create this list:
query param
data layer
rule-based/trigger-based (like for most events, which are usually manually entered into a TMS rule based on certain conditions)
analytics library (aka, plugins)
duplicate of another variable
Dimension Source or Metric Trigger
This contains the details that complement the “source type” column: If it comes from query parameters, WHICH query parameter is it? If it comes from the data layer, what data layer object is it? If it’s a metric, what in the data layer determines when to fire it (for instance, a prodView event doesn’t map directly to a data layer object, but it does RELY on the data layer: we set it whenever the pageType data layer object is set to “product details page”.)
Variable Settings
This is something many SDRs have but can be a pain to keep consistent, because every variable type has different settings options:
As you can see, you’d have to account for a lot of possible settings and combinations- I’ve seen some SDRs with 30 columns dedicated just to variable settings. I tend to simplify and just have one column where I only call out any setting that differs from the default, such as “Expires after 2 weeks” or “merchandising: conversion syntax, binds on internal search event, product view, and cart add.”
Classifications
This should list any classifications set up on this variable. This is a good one to keep updated, though I find many folks don’t.
GDPR Considerations
Don’t forget about government privacy regulations! Use this to flag items that will need to be accounted for in your privacy policies and procedures. Sometimes merely having the column can serve as a good reminder that privacy is something we need to consider when designing our solution.
TMS Rule and TMS Element
I find these very helpful in designing a solution, but I’ll admit, they often fall by the wayside after an implementation is launched- and I don’t even see that as a bad thing. Once configured, your TMS implementation should speak for itself. (This will be even more true when Adobe releases enhanced search functionality in Launch.)
Other tabs
Aside from the variable map, I try to always have a tab/sheet for a Change Log. If nothing else, this can help with version control when someone had a local copy of the SDR that got off sync from the “official” one. It also lets you know who to contact if you have questions about a certain change that was made. I also use this to flag which changes have been accounted for in the Report suite Settings (eg, I may have set aside eVar2 for “internal search terms”, but did I actually turn it on in the tool?)
If you have many Report Suites, it may be helpful to have a tab that lists them all- their friendly name, their report suite ID, any relevant URLs/Domains, and perhaps the business owner of that Report Suite.
Also, if you have multiple report suites, you may want to add columns to the variable map or have a whole separate tab that compares variables across suites (the Report Suite exporter and the Observepoint SDR Builder both have this built in).
What works for you?
As I said, I don’t think my template is going to be the ultimate, universal SDR. I’d love to know what has worked for other people- did I miss anything? Is there anything I’m doing that I should do differently? Do you have a template you’d like to share? I’d love to hear from you!
