Hey Reader!
I was approached recently by a lead who was having trouble getting useful reports after they implemented their consent management platform. This is a pretty common request — lots of places have questionable CMP configurations — but in this case, the "solution" had been to turn off all the tracking, for everyone, no matter where they were.
I mean, technically yes, the site was completely compliant with every global privacy law. But compliance and tracking shouldn't be a battle where one side has to lose everything.
The better fix is tragically more boring and takes time. Region-specific rules give each visitor the consent experience their location requires, with opt-in where the law asks for it and a lighter touch where it doesn't. Set up that way, they could have kept some of their data instead of none of it. Turning everything off is like saying you fixed a plumbing problem in your house by burning it down.
As Jason Mendoza says in The Good Place, "I'm telling you, Molotov cocktails work. Anytime I had a problem and I threw a Molotov cocktail, boom! Right away, I had a different problem."
Please don’t toss a Molotov cocktail at your consent management configuration.
Track Your Black Friday Sales in GA4
Black Friday is coming up fast, and if you set up your tracking now, you'll save yourself time and headaches trying to backstitch data later on. This guide walks through tagging offline ads with UTMs using QR codes and short redirect URLs, then building a GA4 audience so you can see who comes back after the sale. Audiences can't be backfilled, so that part does need to happen before the big day.
How to track your Black Friday sales in GA4
Articles Worth Your Time
———•
|
Data Studio finally gets a UNION operator
Blends in Data Studio now support UNION, so you can stack tables on top of each other instead of only joining them side by side. Mehdi Oudjida walks through it using three Search Console sources (web, image and video). Keep in mind that this is a true UNION that removes duplicate rows, so you'll want a static dimension like the table name if you need every row kept.
Read Mehdi's post on LinkedIn
Verbose logging comes to GTM Preview mode
Simo Ahava noticed a new "Enable verbose logging" checkbox when you start Preview mode in Google Tag Manager. Tick it and Tag Assistant shows Google tag logs in its Console tab, the same detail the old GA Debugger extension used to give you. The logs also show the consent state and the gcs/gcd values the tag sends, which is handy for consent mode QA.
Read Simo's post on LinkedIn
Google changes what counts as a view-through conversion
In case you missed it in October: Demand Gen display ads can now earn view-through conversion credit when as little as one pixel of the ad appears on screen, for any length of time. The old bar was Active View, which meant half the ad was visible for at least a second. If you report on view-through conversions, add an annotation for the switch, because a jump after it is a definition change and not a performance win (sorry PPCers).
Read more on Search Engine Land
Where You Can Find Me
———•
|
Where I've Been
I was recently on the Page 2 podcast, talking about attribution in GA4. It was a fun conversation and I hope it gives you some food for thought!
Watch the episode on YouTube
That's it for this edition of The Huddle. As always, if you have questions or want to share what you're working on, just hit reply!