How to setup Web Analytic data layer?

If one wants to know if their website is contributing to their business the best it can, and one wants to know where it can be improved.

Enter web analytics tools!

Web analytics tools can help you find the answer to nearly any question you have about your website or customers. There are a lot of tempting tools to choose from today. And while one may need more than one, one may not need as many as one thinks. It can be tricky to nail down which ones are needed the most.

Web analytics tools collect data to show how visitors arrive at your website and what they do once they’re there. These tools let you compare data over time to see patterns. Some of the things that website analytics tools can tell you include:

• How do people find your site? What do they do after they get there?
• Which content on your site do people engage with? When and how are they engaging with it?
• Why do some people buy, and others don’t? How can you get more of them to act?

Some analytics programs also include data from social media and mobile apps, overlapping with a broader category of digital analytics.

Data Layer

A data layer is a specification for customer interaction tracking that flows from your properties. This tracked activity comes from many sources, including desktop and mobile websites, mobile apps, connected devices, and offline sources.

The definition of your data layer starts with identifying the most important activity of your visitors, called events. Events encompass everything from page views and site searches to logins, purchases, or any customer action that informs your critical business decisions. Each event contains contextual information, called event attributes.

The data layer helps you take ownership of your most valuable asset – your data. A well-defined and managed data layer brings the following benefits:

• Governance : Take control of your data by establishing a governance policy around your data layer
• Standardization: Use terminology that makes sense to your organization.
• Marketing Agility: A well-implemented data layer allows your marketing strategies to adjust quickly to changing conditions by eliminating your dependency on developing resources.

After your data layer is defined, install it across your digital properties. Follow the installation guides for each platform to ensure the specifications of the data layer are followed consistently. This data is then used in your tag configurations and campaign strategies.

Tealium

Tealium is one of the widely used and trusted customer data platforms. They utilize the data layer defined for user events and activities. The Tealium tag management solution for websites requires two components: the Universal Tag (utag.js) and the Universal Data Object (utag_data). By installing both of these components on every page of your site, one can use the data layer to be captured and used for analysis by Tealium iQ Tag Manager.

The data layer is the foundation of your Tealium solution that comprises all the variables that are collected across your site and the visitor interactions that are tracked.

The Universal Data Object (UDO) is a JavaScript object called utag_data in which dynamic data from your site is passed to the Tealium tag. The properties in this object are named using plain, vendor-neutral terms that are specific to your business.

Tracking events:

Use the utag.link() function to track events such as non-page views, page interactions, and other dynamic page events. Event tracking collects information about a visitor’s interactions within a page.

Tealium provides the data layer variable tealium_event to name your tracked events. It is used within JavaScript event listeners to track events when a user interacts with website elements such as clicking a button.

The following example tracks when a user clicks a social share button:

<a href="#"
   name="share"
   onclick="utag.link({'tealium_event': 'social_share', 'social_network': 'LinkedIn'});"
>Share</a>

Tracking Views:

The utag.view() function is triggered automatically on every page load. It tracks page views, virtual page views, Ajax page flows, and single-page applications. Calling this function triggers the corresponding page tracking functionality within your configured vendor tags.

The following is a content site example in which a visitor searched for “jeans”:

utag.view({
"tealium_event": "search",
"search_keyword": "jeans",
"search_results": "42"
});

Google Analytics – The most popular web analytics tool

Many businesses start with Google Analytics. It’s the most popular solution for web analytics. Over 29 million websites use it. It’s free and robust enough for many small businesses. Using Google Analytics, you can understand which channels bring you website traffic, and see metrics like pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, and bounce rate.

When we develop components used to build the site, parameters can be added to them for data to be captured for Google Analytics to read and provide accurate information for you to measure everything you want. Google Analytics is implemented with "page tags, " called the Google Analytics Tracking Code, a snippet of JavaScript code that the website owner adds to every page of the website.

Customer analytics tools

Customer analytics tools go deeper into customer behavior than other general web analytics tools. These tools pull in customer data from various mediums like the web, mobile, email, and your product. You can create segments based on behavioral patterns, then predict and offer the products and services those distinct groups of customers might buy.

Usability (UX) analytics tools

Usability analytics tools are specialized tools that let businesses analyze what users do on a page. They record how people interact with the page and its elements, so an online marketing or product team can evaluate how different features are received. With these insights, businesses can then make changes to the page or user interface and see how those changes play out by measuring user behavior.

A/B and multivariate testing tools – Adobe Target

You can run the occasional simple A/B test using a general web analytics tool. But if you plan to test and optimize elements of your website regularly, you will benefit from a dedicated testing tool. And if you plan to run multivariate testing, which tests multiple variables on a page at once, you’ll definitely need a tool like one of the following to accurately interpret results.

Adobe Target is the way to go if you are already using the Adobe marketing stack and you want the best tool to integrate with Adobe Analytics. And it offers a very comprehensive list of capabilities. Adobe Target lets you build tests across other digital channels in addition to your website and app, including mobile and email. In fact, you can also set up personalized elements to deploy for users based on rules, profiles/segmentation, and behavioral targeting.

Google Analytics 360

Google Analytics 360 is the premium version of Google Analytics. It includes advanced features that are suited to websites that deal with large numbers of users. This includes unsampled analytics data, meaning that, unlike regular Google Analytics, reports are all based on actual data rather than samples of data for greater accuracy. This enterprise-level web analytics tool integrates with other Google platforms, like Google Ads, as well as other third-party tools, like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This opens up opportunities for campaign insights and remarketing.

Google Analytics 360 also offers advanced attribution modeling, which means a marketing team can use a more sophisticated way to measure the impact of various channels and touchpoints that lead up to a conversion.

Adobe Analytics

Adobe also offers an enterprise-level web analytics suite of tools. This solution is particularly useful for organizations that use Adobe Cloud and Adobe Target because it integrates easily with tools in the Adobe suite. Fans say that its drag-and-drop reporting interface is easy to use. Similar to Google Analytics 360, Adobe Analytics can handle large volumes of data with no data sampling. But it also goes beyond the website-only focus of Google Analytics 360.

The platform also incorporates Adobe Sensei, which brings some benefits like a reduced time to discover statistically valid segments of customers. Data can be ‘activated’ into marketing workflows, meaning the platform can deploy audience segmentation, content optimization, and personalize the experience for the website visitor. The platform also allows broad data collection, even outside Adobe properties.

If you would like to discuss how to track your website, we can help. Please contact us for details.