I did some work behind the scenes of the Harvey Mercheum website in February. I finally set up Google Tag Manager and moved my Google Analytics to it, more on this in a moment. Some time during the process, I noticed my Facebook Follow Social Plugin disappeared. I tried to get it working again, but could not. I have put the Page Plugin in the sidebar where the Follow used to be, but it does not fit very nicely. My apologies for any inconvenience this causes.
There was a good introduction to Google Tag Manager in the Yoast SEO Blog last year. It mentions DuracellTomi’s plugin to add Google Tag Manager to WordPress. I decided to use that plugin, despite my efforts to reduce the number of plugins used by this website.
I also took some of the advice given in this article about safely migrating to Google Tag Manager. I did not want to lose any old Analytics data, and I wanted to make sure the new way of doing things was going to work, so I created a new Property in my Google Analytics account, and used it in Google Tag Manager. However, I took the lazy approach, and did not set up any filters on the new Property. I let it run for part of February, and compared the numbers in the new Property to my old Property’s unfiltered view. The numbers matched, except for the number of users or visitors considered “new”. A few visitors were new to the new Property but not to the old, so the new Property’s “new” numbers were higher. This made sense, so I switched the Tag to the old Property, removed the Google Analytics script using the old Property from the “head” section of all web pages on this website, and deleted the new Property.
Should you wish to do something similar, please note that the LunaMetrics article is from 2015 and has not been updated, so the instructions on how to create the Tag no longer match the Google Tag Manager interface. Follow Google’s own instructions on how to perform this step.
I hope to experiment more with Google Tag Manager, and eventually with Google Data Studio. Keep watching the “Website business” category of the Mercheum Blog for more posts on what I learn!
