Plus: Why going against the alphabet makes queries easier — Long before Firestore made it into the toolkit of Google Tag Manager’s Server-Side offering, it was a powerful document database. Working with Firestore for some years now, I want to share simple tips that may help you avoid the same mistakes I made. First though, I will compare Firestore with…

From “Anonymous Tracking Mode” to Session ID, and: Can you actually track with a Session Cookie only? — The original aim: Track users with only one Session Cookie to comply with certain GDPR interpretations. That started an intriguing journey through the various privacy mechanisms of Piwik Pro. What is “anonymous” about the “Anonymous Tracking Mode”? What is the difference between the Session ID and the Session Cookie? …

Part II of “When you need to wait, you better know for how long” — In part I, we looked at examples why it is important to measure the performance of services your Analytics tracking depends on. In part II, we show how to implement that. Do you have my must-have performance metric in your tracking setup? We’ll demonstrate the Tag Management part via Tealium…

Part I of “When you need to wait, you better know for how long” — What do you do when your AB testing tool starts delivering experiments a second later? Nothing. Because you likely won’t notice. Why you need to monitor the services your web analytics depends on. Real examples! In well-functioning societies, people trust each other. Without trust, even money would simply be colorful…

Let’s talk about Feelings — Who came up with the nonsense that we should decide based on data, not emotions?! Not me! I am fully emotional in all my decisions, and the same holds true for this tool comparison: The only criterion is my emotional state while using GA4, Adobe Analytics, and Piwik Pro —…

Part II of “Losing Weight — A Pruning Diet for your Overweight Adobe Analytics Segments” — After stressing the importance of keeping segments lean and diving deep into the anatomy of Adobe Analytics segments in part I, let’s get to the actual pruning — with a lot of Python and some combinatorics. The winning segment alternative will get Coca-Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki! Again, we will use PyCharm…

Part I of “Losing Weight — A Pruning Diet for your Overweight Adobe Analytics Segments” — The first part of this series on segment pruning sheds light on the anatomy of a segment — the matryoshka-like logic of the underlying JSON structure of Adobe Analytics segments. Also: Did you know what segments and bureaucracy have in common? Whether it’s ever-expanding bot exclusion rules or legacy-ridden filters…

I may be mistaken, but in my understanding, an Event-driven Data Layer is "Event-driven" because it is not simply a static JS object delivered with the page load (like utag_data or older W3C data layer standards). Instead the data is "delivered" via Events. So the Tealium Data Layer (apart from…

Thanks for this article. It summarizes some of the methods I use very well, and it even uncovers the mystery behind the "undebuggable" request payloads of the native Firebase Analytics requests. I would not recommend using BQ streaming as a debugging solution because it is notoriously incomplete in my experience…