Okay, so first of all, thank you, everyone, for attending this Pre MatomoCamp event today.
So from now until the next 60 minutes, so 45 minutes of presentation plus 15 minutes
of questions and answer, I'm going to talk about a specific topic, which is Matomo Tag
Manager, and I'm going to try to cover as many things as I can. So that's why I decided to name
it from A to Z. My name is Ronan Chardonnoux. I'm a professional consultant and trainer on Matomo
Analytics. And as well, I got with a couple of friends this crazy idea of creating an event
named MatomoCamp, which will be held next month, so in 30 days exactly from now, where the idea is
to have people from all over the world to a common stage and make a presentation about Matomo
Analytics, so as I'm doing today. About this presentation, so I choose this specific topic
because last summer we ran a survey on MatomoCamp, so matomocamp.org, survey asking about
what kind of topic would you like us to cover during the MatomoCamp event, which will be
on November the 4th and November the 5th, and one topic which was highly asked was Matomo Tag
Manager, so the idea was today to talk about Matomo Tag Manager, and why are we talking about an event,
pre-event today, whereas the official event will be in one month. The idea is that as it's the first
time that we organize such an event with a team who, let's say, don't know each other, who has no,
let's say, IT infrastructure defined, we decided to launch a pre-event in order to test our IT
infrastructure in order to ensure that on the day we are able to scale the different conferences
for the volume of attendees. So this is what we are doing today, so I really would like to thank
two guys who are behind the screen, or at least behind the server, let's say, Lukas Winkler,
Lukas Winkler that you just heard in the introduction was answering to me, and as well,
Valentin, who is from a company named Empreinte Digital, and will in fact scale the server
and install the different software on the server in order for us to be able to held
this pre-MatomoCamp and the MatomoCamp event as well. If you have any questions at any time,
please feel free to drop us an email directly on matomocamp.org, so I can show you the website. So
here is the website, so matomocamp.org, you just need to go over here and write and contact us.
So as, what you can do is you can go on live.matomocamp.org, so you can click over here,
and if you click over here, you will get, in fact, access to the stream that you are currently
viewing right now, and in addition to that, at the bottom of the page, you're going to see the
metrics chat, which is the chat that we use in order to communicate with each other, and of course,
the place where you can ask some questions. So yes, if you have some questions, please feel free to
use either contact us page, and or you can as well use directly the chat over here on which you can
send some questions. I can see already that someone is typing in something, so if you have
some questions dealing with either the event or the presentation that I'm doing today about Matomo
Tag Manager, please feel free to do so. So the topic of today is Matomo Tag Manager,
so we're going to first start with a definition. Matomo Tag Manager is what we call a tag management
system, so it's already like three big words here, tag management and system. Management system,
you probably already, you are probably familiar with it, so if you are taking a content management
system, for example, such as Drupal, such as WordPress, such as, I don't know, proprietary
solutions, such as Wix or that kind of thing, you know already what it refers to. Content management
system is a software which is here in order to manage some content, such as posts, such as pages,
such as media, or any kind of other, let's say, content that you can imagine. In a tag management
system, instead of managing contents like mostly media and text content, you're going to manage
what we call tags, and tags are nothing more than, in fact, tracking codes. And some of you may not
be familiar with tracking codes, but you may, I guess, have seen at least once, when you access
to your Matomo installation, and then the first, let's say the first step that you need to do in
order to send some data to your Matomo is to copy and paste a snippet, a tracking code, or we can
call it a tag, which looks like this, and this is exactly what we are talking about here.
Tags are nothing more than those snippets of code that you insert on your website in order to push
data to Matomo. This is what it's about. So, Matomo Tag Manager is nothing more than a piece
of software, a place where you're going to manage, instead of content, you manage tags, you manage
tracking codes, in order to push your data collection to the next level. This is what it
is about. So, of course, for most of the people, they don't really see the advantage of it because
they are used to play with this single tracking code, which is pushing most of the time enough
information in order to start, in fact, your analysis, because it's pushing out the page that
you are looking at, it's pushing out through the enabled link tracking, the clicks, which are performed
downloadable clicks, downloadable files, and outlinks, but it may happen that in some cases,
you may want to collect more interaction than those three. For example, tomorrow you may be
interested in measuring the fact that people are scrolling down the page because you would like to
know if they read your content entirely, or at least if they view it entirely. If you have some
videos on your website, you may be interested in knowing if people are clicking on the play button,
pause button. If you have some pictures on your website, and when you hover your mouse over them,
because it gets bigger, like there's a zoom which is happening, that's typically the kind of thing
that you want to perform with additional, let's say, tracking data collection,
and let's say scenario system, and it's exactly what you do with a tag management system. By the
way, within this presentation, I will, of course, demo, I will choose a website, and we'll implement
a tag management system in order for you guys to see really how you can push your data collection
to the next level. This is exactly what I just mentioned, so I'm not going to go back on it.
Why should you use a tag management system, or why should you use Matamode tag manager? Well,
for better management, so it's exactly like a CMS. In a CMS, you create a lot of blog posts,
you create different pages, you have different authors, you know when it's published, who has
done what, and when. It's exactly the same thing with a tag management system. The idea is to have
a backend on which you know what are different tracking codes which have been implemented on your
website, who has done what, what has been implemented, and here we are talking about
project management, that more transparency within your organization, about knowing about what your
colleagues have implemented already, about, it's also about better communication between
your IT teams and marketing and communication teams. It's of course easy to know what happened
in the history of your website in terms of data collection. It's as well better in terms of
security in the sense that you know at least what is deployed and when it is deployed. It can,
in some cases, decrease the loading time of your website because most of the time what you do when
you implement for the first time your basic tracking code on your website, you're just copying
and pasting it everywhere, and when you add some other tracking code, you may have the same,
let's say the same configuration, like putting it everywhere, whereas with the tag management system,
you can decide when you would like those tags to be triggered or not, and of course
if you optimize this, well, you can only measure what you need and not the amount of data that you
need and not the extra data that you'll probably never look at. And as well, and this is very
important, it gives more autonomy to marketing and communication teams, let's say the non-tech teams,
and it allows them to more easily deploy advanced measurements without relying on, let's say,
some deployment time from the IT team. How tag management systems are working? Well,
you will see that it's really similar to what you are used to because most of the time you copy and
paste this tracking code, you put it on all the pages. With the deployment of a tag management
system, all you need to do is that instead of copying and pasting this code on all the pages,
what you do is that you just click over here, this is very simple, it's named Matamode Tag Manager,
and in fact, you take this snippet of code that you put as well on all the pages. In fact, this
code is going to substitute this one, okay? So you take this one, you copy and paste it on all the
pages on your website, and voila. Then once this one is deployed everywhere on your website, on
all the pages on your website, then you can in fact use the backend of the tag management system,
the backend of the tag management system, which will be displayed over here. So if you cannot
see it right now on your Matamode installation, that's probably because maybe it has not been
installed. So it's a plugin that you need to download and activate. It's a free plugin,
you don't have to pay for it. Or either it means that someone gives you an access to Matamode,
but you have extra rights in order to have an access to it. So in Matamode, you have the
superuser, you have the admin, you have the write access, you have the read access, and you get the
anonymous access, and you get as well special rights for the tag manager. So in order to play
with it, you will need to ask either to your admin or superuser, I don't remember which one,
in order for them to give you an access to it. Once you get an access to it, well, you just need
to click, and then you will see here the backend. And here the backend, in fact, over here, represents
all the tags and different configurations I'm going to talk about later on, which will, in fact,
be fired thanks to the tracking code that I was, that was showing you just right here. So in fact,
here, this is what we can call a master tracking code, which is going to control, which is going
to execute everything which is located over here within this backend. To make it simple,
this is the classical configuration that you add so far. So this is your website without tag
management system. So you have, let's say, one tracking code, one tag for every solution that
you want to, that you use in order to collect some data. So let's imagine that here instead of
analytics.js, it's your classic Matomo tracking code. Here is another tracking code that you're
going to install, because I don't know, you are playing with some advertising networks, okay,
without naming it like the big American one, let's say conversion tracking code. And then in addition
to that, you have as well another tracking code, such as, let's say, NAB testing solution. With a
tag management system, what's going to happen is that you're just going to have your container
over here, which is the master tag that was showing you some minutes ago. So the Matomo
tag manager.js container. And then, in fact, all those scripts are going to be added within
this one, thanks to the UI that we can see over here. So here I'm going to go into detail in this
one. But as you can see, I can add tags. So it's not like only centered around Matomo. A tag manager
is a general name in order to be able, let's say, to collect, to gather all the different tracking
codes that you would like to send to other players or other solutions that you are on your server.
So you can, this is probably one of the ones that you will play the most with, which is custom
HTML, which allows you to copy and paste any script that you want over here. And on SmallVoila,
this is exactly what we want to perform here, is that to have within one single system,
named the tag management system, all our different tracking codes in order to organize better our
data collection model. This is what I just explained. So this is the master tracking code
that you need to implement on your website in order to get started. Of course, according to
the different CMS that you are using, there's already some plugins which are here and there
in order for you to even make this installation even faster. How does a tag management system
work? Well, it works with mainly three components. The first one is what we call a tag. So the tag
represents the solution to which you would like to send the data to. So this is what we have over
here. This is the list of the different tracking code that we can pick up. Once you choose a tag,
so let's say I want to send the data to Matomo, then you're going to configure it. I'm going to
go into detail into this one later on. And then you need to explain when you would like this given
tag to be triggered, so to say to be executed. I'm going to take back the example that I had
some minutes ago, which was about, okay, you would like to measure the fact that people
are scrolling down your website and you would like to send this information to Matomo. So what
you will do is that you pick up a tag which is Matomo Analytics tag. You're probably going to
send what we call an event, which is an interaction. So you send an interaction to Matomo,
and you would like this to happen every time that someone is scrolling down. And to do so,
what you will do is that you will select a second, let's say, big name or component that we have
within the tag management vocabulary, which is trigger. And this is what we have over here. So
here you get the list of triggers, so to say the condition in order for the tracking code to be
executed. And here you're going to select, for example, over here, the scroll reach in order
to say, okay, if someone is scrolling down my page, I want the tag to be fired. And here by
default is going to be fired every time that the people are going to scroll down more than 50%
of the page. Or you can, of course, change that out and say, okay, when they scroll up to 90%
of the page. And this is how it's going to work. So as a recap, it's you select the, let's say,
the place where you would like to send the data to, either Matomo, either an advertising platform,
or either any other solution that you have on your server. Then over here as a trigger,
you define the condition in order for this tag to deploy in order to execute your tracking code.
And last but not least, exactly like in a content management system, when you write a blog post,
it's by default written as a draft. And then if you want to put it live, to send it for real
on your website, you need to publish. And this is exactly what we have over here. You see with
a small rocket, it's the publish button. And when you click on it, it means that what you configured
over here is going to be sent to the solution that you want, either Matomo or either an advertising
platform or anywhere else. I'm not going to detail much about all the other, let's say,
possibilities because I can talk about the preview mode. I can talk as well about variable
and so on and so forth. But I'm not going to make it complex. So far, I'm just going to
make a brief demo in order for you to clearly identify what's the point and what we are talking
about here. So just to conclude with, let's say, the theoretical approach is that you select a tag,
you link it to a trigger, and then you publish. You send it live. For the sake of the conference,
what I'm going to do is that I'm going to take a real use case. What I did is that I use a website
named the uselessweb.com, which is randomly picking up a website just for you to know that
I'm not taking any website from a client or anything like this. And I ended up with the
following website. So I don't know this website at all. I'm just going to try to show you how a tag
manager will be useful here. So as I don't know the webmaster of the website over here, I'm going
to use a great extension, which has been recommended to me by a guy named Thomas Persson from Digitalis
AB that you will probably see during the Matomo campus. He's doing a lot of conferences about
Matomo. This extension is available for Google Chrome, Chromium, and everything which is Google
Chrome something. It's named user, CSS, and JavaScript. It's very useful because it allows
you to insert some tracking code on a website that you don't own. So it's really good for demoing.
So that's what I'm going to do here. So first things first is that I'm going to show you
what the website would have looked like in Matomo if I wouldn't have used the tag management system.
So I'm going to take the classic tracking code and I'm going to go over here on the website. I'm
going to use this given extension. So the extension will just require me to remove the HTML comments
so as the script tag like this. And now we are good to go. So I'm going to call it originally
matmo matmo camp. Okay. Save and let's go. Okay. So now what's going to happen is that if I look
at the website right now, the tracking code is going to be implemented. So normally if I go
over here on this page, I should see that I get my visits. Okay. Great. It works. So this is,
this is myself. So nothing incredible here. Okay. It's exactly what we are used to see with a
traditional Matomo tracking code. As you can see, if I scroll down the page and if I look at my
Matomo, nothing crazy will come. And the reason is that this is the classic tracking code. So
it's just measuring the page view and just the click as well on outlinks. And we mentioned it's
as a file extension downloads. So here, let's imagine, for example, I would like to track the
number of people who are clicking on this given image. You see I'm like clicking like five times
on it. Nothing's going to happen. Why is that? Well, because the classic tracking code of Matomo
has not been, is not hyper here. If I click, for example, here on the RSS, as you can see on the
bottom left of my page is going to go on the same, I think it's going to go on index. I'm going to
double check if this will be measured by Matomo. Yes. This one's going to be measured by Matomo.
It's just that it's not telling me that it's an RSS feed, but I could somehow guess it.
Get in touch is a mail too. So I'm going to click on it. I'm going to see if it's going to work.
No, it's not working. So here, this is just what I wanted to show you is that the classic
Matomo tracking code won't measure probably everything that you need. So if you want to
know, for example, if people are interacting with your images, if you want to know if people are
clicking over here on the image, if you want to know if they reach a specific part of the content
of your page, you cannot know it by default with the classic tracking code of Matomo.
Now we're going to see what's going to happen if I deploy a Matomo Tag Manager tracking code. So
I'm going to go over here in Tag Manager. I'm going to pick up the
container. As I previously mentioned it, what's going to happen is that I'm going to use on small
this extension. So it's, which one do I want to play with? It's this one. Okay. I'm going to remove
this one. And now we're going to see what's going to happen. So oops. And save. Okay. All good.
And save. Okay. All good. Now I go back on the page. Nothing's going to happen. Nothing's going
to be incredible right now, because as you can see from the backend of my solution, I have not
yet configured the different behavior that I want to measure, like the score tracking, like the click
on the mail tool, and so on and so forth. So this is what we're going to do right now. So I'm going
to create a new tag. These tags are going to be like, I'm going to call it like scroll event
Matomo Ethics. So I just want to have a name, which is different than the other tag, which is already
implemented, which is just measurement of page view. Here I'm going to say, okay, I want to measure
an event, not a page view, because it has no sense. I mean, someone who is scrolling down the page is
still on the same page, so I don't need another page view to be recorded. Then I'm going to have
to insert here different values. This is specific to events, because an event is defined by a
category, an action, and the name. I mean, that's what Matomo is expecting to have as an event.
So here I can fill them with whatever data that I want, but also a time you organize your company,
you organize your analytic system in a certain way, and you want to have a naming conversion,
which makes sense. So most of the time, the category of an event will be something like,
okay, we want to measure interactions. The action is, let's say, the scroll. This is what people
perform. This is scroll. And name, I could put the same name as this one, but will be redundant.
And so what I'm going to do here is that I'm going to pick up over here what we call a variable.
Instead, so variable means that it's not going to be an outcoded value like I did here. It's
going to be something which is dynamic based on what we call the DOM of the page, the document
object model, which is the information which are on the page. And so here they are. And the one that
I'm interested in is technically be, in fact, the page URL, but I would rather prefer to know
how far people are scrolling down the page. So I'm going to pick up over here the scroll,
and it's the scroll vertical percentage. So until which level do people scroll down.
And now I'm going to add a trigger. So the trigger is, as I previously mentioned, is the condition
for which the data will be collected. So I'm going to pick up over here the scroll reach.
And I want it to be fired. I would consider like, yeah, 50% is fine to me. And that's it.
So I click over here and create new trigger. So what I did over here is that I said to the system,
please Matomo Tag Manager, send an event with those values, so as a category interaction,
as an action scroll, and as a name, pick up the dynamic value to which the people scroll down.
And I want you to fire every time that someone is reaching more than 50% of the scroll of the page.
And now I can create my tag, and I can decide to publish. So it means like everything which is
now within the container, I want it to go live. So I go over here. I give the name of the version.
So like scroll deployment. And I click over here. And now what is happening is that
everything which was within my container, so here the measurement of the page view,
the measurement of scroll event, should have been, if my demo is going in the right direction,
should have been deployed properly. So if I go now back on the website, well, nothing impressive
is happening because I have not yet scrolled down my page. So if I go over here, I will still see
that's okay. I'm over here. I mean, the page is currently viewed. The time is correct. But I have
not yet scrolled down. So there's no scroll event which are measured. And now if I scroll down,
as you can see, I'm not yet at 50%. So I'm like 30% here. If I go back and let my refresh,
nothing should have happened. And this is normal because I have not yet reached the 50%. I'm going
to reach the 50%. This is a long page. So it's probably okay. I'm not yet at 50%.
But I'm just going to refresh in order to show you that it's still not deployed. And now
if I go, okay, here I guess I reached at least 60 or 70%. So normally if I'm lucky enough,
I should see, wow, okay, I'm lucky enough. You see, as you can see, the event has been measured.
So like, okay, I reached more than 50% of the page. So it's pushing to the system,
interaction, scroll, and 50, which represent exactly what I wanted. And once those data are
sent, as I decided to send them as an event, they will show up over here in behavior and then event.
And I will see them over here. So of course, it's going to give me a lot of valuable information
that I didn't have so far. So far with a, let's say, classic tracking measurement,
all I could say that people are going on the page, but I don't know if they are reading the
content at all, or at least I don't know if they are interacting with the page at all.
And thanks to the scroll tracking, I can already say that, okay, at least they understood that
they can, let's say, go down the page. Let's take maybe another example,
and we're going to take this button, which is the get in touch. So here it's, this one is more for
contact interaction. So this is of course very interesting because probably, I mean, this guy,
I don't know who is behind the website, but probably he or she wants to get his book
purchased or anything like this. So getting the measurement of people who had an intent to contact
him, I think it's important. So I'm going to do is that I'm going to hover my mouse over here on the
elements because I will need this element information in order to configure my Matomo
Tag Manager. Here what I can see is that I have a, it's a link, which is an href, which contains
an information, which is mailtooth, so as a text element, which is get in touch. So here I can play
differently. I can configure it differently, but I guess that in my case, I will probably say, okay,
every time someone's going to click on a link on the page, which contain the information,
get in touch as a text element, I want the information to be sent to Matomo. So that's
what I'm going to do. So I'm going to go back over here within Matomo. I'm going to select
Matomo Analytics as a tag. I could definitely decide to send the data to a third party player.
I mean, that's totally fine. It of course depends on the different information system that you are
using, but in my case, I'm just using Matomo Analytics. So I'm going to call it like Intents
to Contact, Intent to Contact, and I keep the name Matomo Analytics. So here I could decide
to send it as an event or to send it as a goal. Maybe for the sake of this example,
I'm going to use a goal. The reason why I would like to use a goal is just for this
presentation for you guys to see differences. So let's imagine that I want to consider it
as a goal. The purpose of my website is really to get some leads, to get some contacts,
and probably this interaction has far more value than just scrolling down. If people are scrolling
down, nothing is telling me that they are going to contact and purchase my books. Whereas if they
contact me to get in touch, there's probably a highest probability that those people convert.
So that's probably why I want to define a goal here rather than an event.
I'm going to add a trigger now. So the trigger will be an interaction which is based on the click,
which is based on the link element. So I'm going to call it like Link Click Mail To.
And here I'm going to use a filter because if I just set it like this, it will be like
every link that I click on the website, which will be measured as a goal. That's typically not
what I want to do because I have many links on the page. As you can see, I've got one here,
I've got one here, I've got many. That's not what I want to do. So I want to filter it and I want
to say, okay, it's just every time that someone is going to click on an element of the page,
so to say here the link where the value equal get in touch. Okay. So click text, get in touch.
Here I'm saying, okay, if someone click on the link which contain the text, which is in my case,
get in touch. Okay. And now I can create my tag. So it's not going to work straight away.
All I need to do first is to go over here in Matomo and I need to add a goal because I haven't
done it yet. MailToIntentToContact. So for the people who don't know what a goal is,
it's like the most important action that you would like to measure on your website. Here I'm
going to select a manual goal because that's how the Matomo Tag Manager recognizes goals
with child shift. You need to set them as a manual. I'm going to select a low goal to be
converted more than on the visit just for debug purposes and as well because probably one person
during the visit can be interesting contacting me multiple times. It's not making much sense,
but we never know. So this is what I did. So same thing as last time. Nothing extraordinary
is going to happen right now because I have not yet published my work. So now I can decide to publish
it. But in my case, I'm going to use something that I have not yet shown you, which is the preview
and debug mode because if I publish it, I mean, it's fine in order to make some demo and stuff,
but if you do it for real and that you mess up something up, it means that everybody,
all the visitors who are going to go on your website will probably send you some fake data
or the wrong data and this is like this. So it's a good practice to never publish straight away,
but just to preview first in order to say, okay, I want to see if my implementation is correct
rather than directly publishing it live. In fact, using the preview mode, it's like reviewing your
content draft before publishing it. So that's what I'm going to do over here. So in order to
activate the preview mode, you need to enable it within the Matomo Tag Manager, so as I did,
and then you need to open the following parameter at the end of the URL. If for some reason it
doesn't work like right now, it's probably that you need to clear your cache first, so CTRL F5,
and then if you are lucky, so as I do, you get in fact the preview mode which is activated here.
So here the preview mode is telling me, okay, the first tag has been deployed, which is the
page view one, the fact that the page has been viewed. The scroll tracking has not been yet
fired, and that's normal because I have not yet scrolled down up to 50%, and the intent to contact
tag has not been deployed yet, hasn't been executed because I haven't yet clicked and get in touch.
Just for the sake of the example, you see if I scroll down the page, if I go up to 50%,
I get the scroll reach over here, and the scroll reach is executed. Okay, so this is what the preview
mode is about. It's about showing you, debugging, helping you in knowing if the tag that you
implemented is working or not. What I'm going to do right now is I'm going to click and get in touch,
and if I'm lucky enough, normally what's going to happen over here is that an event will be fired
in order to say, hey, you know what, the trigger that you implemented with the tag associated to
it worked, and it has been recorded by the system. So here I'm going to click on get in touch. Since
that I'm kind of lucky, as you can see, the whole link click has been deployed, and here
I'm getting it, so it's great. It means that the data has been sent to Matomo, so I can now
peacefully look over here and have, in fact, as you can see, the goal which has been deployed.
So this is, in fact, what Matomo Tag Manager is about. As I said, it's like pushing your data
collection to the next level by giving you the possibility to implement very complex tracking,
let's say, method easily thanks to a backend. So, of course, shown like this, you may have the
feeling that it's super hard to do, it's going to take me hours to do, I need training, and so on
and so forth. Well, just to let you know, just by watching this video, watching this training,
let's say this conference, you already learned a lot. After, it's a lot about practice. So,
in order to practice, what you can do is exactly the way I did it, is like using this extension
and use a JavaScript and CSS, implement it on a website that you don't own, and then send the data
to a Matomo website that you have, who will be just for the sake of the demo, just for the sake
of practice, and this is how you can learn a lot. Then you have as well on matomo.org, you have a
full guide, which is over here, that you can, you just need to type Tag Manager, and you will see,
in fact, the full guide over here from the Matomo team. And then at the end of the guide, you even
get Tag Manager training. So, unfortunately, that's me again, but with full videos that you can watch
explaining you everything that I just show you step by step in order for you guys to feel more
confident with the Tag Management system. So, that's really what I wanted to show you as,
let's say, the intermediate, let's say, the basic and intermediate level of using a Matomo
Tag Manager, or let's say a Tag Manager in general. This is about understanding what it is about and
being able to play with the user interface in order to be able already to make some data collection.
Then, of course, after some practice, the fact to start to be used with it. And the next part,
which is about how to go to the next level, is about knowing what we call the use of the,
so, that's my presentation. But the next part in order to move to the next level is really to
understand what is the data layer and how you can use it and why is it useful. So, here's the
controversy around the Tag Management system. The Tag Management system, as you can see, is
mostly advertised for communication and marketing department guys in order to tell them, okay, now
you have the super tools which can make super complex things and you don't need to rely on the
IT guys anymore. That's the way it is advertised, but you have to know that the way you play or the
way I show you how to play with the Tag Management system is just one part of it. That's the part
which is the less techy, but for, let's say, advanced and complex project, you will need to
use what we call a data layer, which this part relies on your IT dev teams. I'm going to explain
myself a little bit. Let's use another example here in order for what I'm explaining you to make
more sense. Let's imagine, for example, that you would like to collect as a data for this given
page the author of the page. You would like to push to the fact that this given piece of content
has been returned by John. The problem here is that the name John is not on the page. You see,
I can look on the page. Oh, by the way, I have a John. Bad example. I'm going to say it's written
by Johnny. Johnny, double N. I don't have any Johnny on the page. That's problematic, because
I cannot send this data to Matomo, but me, as a webmaster, I know that it's Johnny who wrote this
given page. So, how can I do this? Well, just with the time measure, the way I show it to you, I
cannot. But with, let's say, the contribution of the IT guys, thanks to the data layer, I could make
this data available, because you know within your internal system, your CMS, for example, or any
user database, that this is John who wrote the content, because on your CMS, you have the
possibility to insert the data that the author, for example, it's just that you decided to not show
it up on the page, but you need this information in order to send it to Matomo. So, what you need
to play with, what you need to have here is what we call a data layer, which consists of a piece of
additional code that you add on the page in order for Matomo Tag Manager to be able to grab this
information and then push it out to the system. So, it consists of lines of code that you add like
this, like this one, directly on the page. And, of course, here, what we call the value are written
in programming language. Most of the time, it's PHP or other language that your dev team is familiar
with in order to fetch the database, require the data that you want, and then make it available for
you within what we call a data layer that you can afterwards get within the system. So, for the sake
of the example, what I'm going to do is that I'm going to go back over here, and I'm going to add
physically this data layer thing. So, this is what I'm going to do here. I'm going to just name like
an author. And I'm going to give it a name, which is, as I said, it's going to be Jonny. So,
yes. So, Jonny. And I should be good to go. Okay. So, this is what I have now. I have a data layer
on the page with a variable, which is author, which has a value, which is Jonny. And what I can
do now within the tag management system, so I'm just going to go back on it. Yes, tag management
system. I'm just going to create this variable, and you're going to see that we can grab this value
and make it available for the tag manager. So, I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to select
what we call the data layer. I'm going to give it a name, which is explicit and which, of course,
corresponds to the data layer that I created, which is author. And now it's going to make a bridge
between the tag manager and the data layer. And now I need to ask myself, okay, how can I push it
to the system? So, in my case, I'm going to, how could I do it? I'm just thinking about this is,
there's going to be a custom dimension. So, I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to create a
custom dimension. The custom dimension is going to be at the action level. It's going to be named
author. It's going to be active. And that's it. So, for the people who don't know what is a custom
dimension, it's an entry that we create in Matomo, which is custom. So, it means it doesn't exist by
default. It's just, it corresponds to what your website collects, but Matomo has no entry for it.
So, that's why it's a custom one. And I just created it in order to be able to have a place
where to send the data to within Matomo. And that's mostly it. What I need to do now is just to,
in fact, correct this given tag, because this tag is the one dealing with the page view.
And I just want to modify this one and say every time that the page is going to be loaded,
I want as well to send information dealing with the author, because I want to know who wrote
the page. So, I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to select the data variable that I created.
And now, if I'm lucky enough on small, I'm not going to publish it. I'm just going to stay in
preview mode. But if I have done this thing properly, I should see the author showing up
within my Matomo Analytics. So, on small, I'm going to go over here within the visit log,
showing you that so far the information is not collected dealing with the page. So, here,
for example, if I hover my mouse over this page, I don't know who is the author of the page.
But now, if I'm lucky enough and if I put myself in preview mode like this,
okay. So, here the page has been loaded. So, normally the variable should have been sent
as well. So, I'm going to look at the data layer. Here within the data layer, I know that I have an
author named Johnny, which is exactly what I wanted. And if I look at the Matomo configuration,
normally on small, I should have, yes, I have it. You see custom dimension index one value Johnny.
That's perfect. So, I can now go back within my Matomo. I can refresh my page. And normally,
if I hover my mouse over the page, as you can see, there's a custom dimension
named author equal Johnny, which is telling me that this page has been written by Johnny.
So, if I go over here in behavior, I should see author and I should see the name Johnny,
if I'm lucky enough. So, it's loading the page. It's a chip server that I have here. So,
that's the reason why it's taking some time. And here, as you can see, I get to report name
author with Johnny. And then I get the different pages which have been written by Johnny.
So, that's everything that I wanted to show you for today. I'm going to look at the different
questions which are asked within the chat for the people who had the chance to watch it. I just would
like to say thank you for all the people who are attending it today. I think we encountered,
let's say, technical issues. So, that's great that we organized this program at MatomoCamp.
If you have any questions dealing with Matomo Tag Manager, just feel free to send them through
matomocamp.org through our contact form. Or feel free as well to send directly your questions
directly through the metrics that we have right now running at the moment.