For those who are not familiar with MVC (Model–view–controller), MVC is a software architectural pattern primarily used for web development and to implement user interfaces. Ruby on Rails (RoR), Django, Spring MVC, ASP .net, Symfony, Zend, Express are some of the most popular MVC frameworks currently available for rapid web development. Over the time web development community has immensely benefited from these MVC frameworks.

In a recent InfoWorld article, FoundationDB’s Stephen Pimentel explained the rise of the multimodel database. A multimodel database uses a single data store to support multiple data models. For instance, FoundationDB tries to map documents, graphs, and relational tables to a key-value data store.

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.