A recent white paper from Ghostery provides some interesting best practices for managing your site’s marketing cloud. Following is a rundown of key take aways from the report including my own comments.
If you are working with an e-commerce website, 5 to 10 e-commerce conversion pixels are quite common these days. Ad conversion pixels, affiliate conversion pixels, web analytics conversion pixels are most common type of tags typically deployed on an e-commerce website. Most of conversion pixels are designed to collect the transaction data such as id, total revenue, tax, products etc.
A recent Google report highlights poor viewability of digital ads and offers some interesting statistics around various viewability factors. Report suggests that about fifty percent of ad impressions are never seen which means basically fifty percent of display spending are just wasted.
Recently I discovered Looker, a relatively new Business Intelligence (BI) platform which utilises a YAML based modeling language LookML. LookML is core engine of Looker. LookML offers a very powerful, highly expressive yet lightweight modeling layer. LookML combines data modelling with on-demand data transformations, and data derivations at the same layer.
Recently Clive Sirkin, the chief marketing officer of Kimberly-Clark suggested that best marketer in a digital world would be the marketing technologists. I am in complete agreement with Sirkin’s observation. Scott Brinker called marketing technologist as Neo of the marketing matrix.
Jsonnet is a new domain specific configuration language from Google which allows you to define data templates. These data templates are transformed into JSON objects using Jsonnet library or command line tool. As a language, Jsonnet is extension of JSON - a valid JSON object is always valid Jsonnet template. In terms of use cases, initial focus seems to be on configuration management, package definition, application configuration, etc.
Sometime you want to generate UUID for visitors on your web property and set UUID as cookie. I want to show how easy it is to set your own visitor UUID cookie using Google Tag Manager(GTM). Once visitor UUID cookie is set you can pass this UUID to other tags. Normally most of tags set tag specific UUIDs but by setting your own UUID you can manage your own cookie match table with your own UUID as primary key. So lets get started.
By default Google Tag Manager (GTM) provides several handy macros and lookup table macro is one of them. In GTM, by using lookup table macro you can reduce number of deployed tags as well as the number of rules you need to load the tags. When implementing tags in GTM always follow famous DRY principle (don’t repeat yourself). Use of lookup table avoids duplication and enables reusability.
In simple words, a Google Tag Manager (GTM) container holds other tags. GTM container is also know as universal container tag or site-wide tag. A GTM container is managed via GTM dashboard and controls tag dependencies and tag firing order. On your web page, you can have multiple GTM containers. GTM container code looks like following - embedded either header or footer of your web page template.
Believe it or not, on average an US ecommerce website has between 15-20 marketing tags. Implementing and maintaining these many marketing tags on your website is often a cumbersome job. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a great tool for marketer as well as developers. Like any other Tag management solution (TMS), GTM not only decouples deployment of these marketing tags but also introduces an efficient way of sharing data to these tags via data layer.
Few months back I managed to get Statamic working with Varnish. Setting up Varnish for Statamic was quite easy and my website performance improved drastically (you can see load and performance testing benchmarks here). One of the biggest challenges was Varnish cache invalidation on content update. Every time, Statamic content was updated I have to invalidate cache manually using curl requests.