In previous posts I argued that an entity is a thing that's of special interest to the business. For ecommerce, an obvious one is product (but is certainly not the only one). An entity at its core is an object, but a special kind of object by virtue of its importance to the business. We've also looked at how interactions are universally made up of the same basic components -- subject, verb, object, context. We've seen that each of these components has its own dictionary. It's all very conceptual so far. The first step to putting this into … [Read more...]

My last post gave a simplified overview of the developer process behind this approach. I showed how the dev teams would create a set of helper functions to generate these dictionaries server-side. These functions would then be called whenever a new interaction is "packaged" up. The resulting interaction dictionary is then passed off as a whole to Google Tag Manager for the next stage in the process. But now it's time to go back to the start, the actual process for fleshing out and managing these dictionaries before any code is … [Read more...]

In previous posts I argued that every interaction has a structure that applies almost universally. Of its components, the most important ones are the object of the interaction (what the user interacted with directly) and the business entity it relates to (the thing that's of particular interest to the business to measure). These can be one and the same but often they are not. If interactions are made up of components, then it makes sense to think of interactions as a Lego set. Take out one brick and replace it with another to come up with … [Read more...]

In the previous post we looked at the basic anatomy of an interaction and how similar it is to English grammar. I argued that (almost) every interaction is related to a thing that is of particular interest to the business. I call this an entity to distinguish it from the object of the interaction (e.g. the link the user clicked on). Read part one if you've missed it. In this post I want to explore the concept of entity dictionary. Have a look at this screenshot which emulates an interaction-level report. What's wrong with this picture? … [Read more...]

Like every other self-respecting digital analyst, I started playing with Enhanced Ecommerce soon after it became public. I'd read the Developer Guide several times and while it seemed quite straight forward on the surface, there was something nagging me about the anatomy of the enhanced ecommerce event. Up until now we've been tracking interactions following a seemingly simple structure that closely resembles English grammar (even if we don't think of it in that way). Credit goes to the guys at Snowplow who have pioneered the concept of event … [Read more...]