PRJ – 2

Wednesday 5/08: 8AM – 3PM

I continued work on the delete button that wasn’t working properly and resolved another mistake I had made on Friday. In order to make the delete button work, the same table reference value must be set to null. I do not want to recursively delete the parent product so I must remove the reference before deleting the product. I am yet to implement a fix since there is something I do not understand happening. I need to ask some questions before I can continue.

In the mean time I started working on implementing Google Analytics (GA) to a new customer facing application in order to see how it was being used by visitors. This had to be done through Google Tag Manager. I have used Google Analytics before but not through Google Tag Manager (GTM) and didn’t know what it was. Turns out GTM, once integrated into the application, allows people with no real coding knowledge to manage GA events and triggers through GUI configuration. After learning what GTM was, I found this npm package which easily integrates GTM into a React application. After setting up a basic page view tracker, the most basic feature of GA, I looked into tracking a button click. The application I was working on automatically provides a quote for a specific product, so I wanted to track the users who completed the action of finalizing the process of getting one.

I spent the rest of the day working on GTM and GA to track the specific button I wanted to track by class. After setting up the trigger in GTM, the event was being logged on GA successfully. Now I had to create a goal on GA to track conversions. Conversions are basically completions of tasks on your website. Eg singing up or subscribing to an emaill list etc. Conversions are split into macro and micro conversions, a macro conversion is when a full task is complete. Eg a purchase is made or in my case a quote is requested. Micro conversions are steps towards this task. Eg selecting a product or adding something to your cart.

Requesting a quote is a macro conversion since it completes what the app was designed to do, provide a quote. You can track conversions by setting up a goal that tracks the event we set up earlier on GTM. Initially I thought I had done something wrong since the conversions weren’t being tracked on GA and went home expecting to be working on it the next day but found it working the next day. I believe GA takes time to sync or register the changes.