My job title is currently Senior Web Developer. My general job description is to translate static designs into working web sites and web applications. It's mostly the visual portion of the visitor's user experience. Other elements of my job include implementing tagging scripts for various analytical and social media platforms so that site and application usage can be tracked and analyzed. I am not a data analyst. I do recall some of the vocabulary associated to statistics from my high school math courses, and I even remember some of what those words mean. But I am by no means an expert.
Because site and application analytics are a large part of how businesses figure out how valuable their online properties are, our clients occasionally assume that I understand the data that is collected by platforms like Google Analytics. In some general terms I do understand some of it, like page views, engagement time, event counts, and even some key events/conversions. It does not mean that I know how to build out custom variables and event tags to gather the data that they want to see. My recommendation to clients is to consult with data analysis experts. They will understand the full range of vocabulary used and will have experience creating the custom data tools that they will need.
Since I am the one who seems to be asked all the questions about Analytics, I am needing to look at how Tag Manager works and how I can find the results of the created tags in Analytics. It is not an easy task. Some of the tutorials assume levels of understanding that I do not necessarily have, so I have to try to find those early base levels of information first. What these tutorials deem as rudimentary, I am finding difficult to wrap my head around. A lot of the information seems to be a loop of elements that can potentially put variables inside of variables inside of variables and I still don't get the information that I think I should be getting.
My only option seems to be plugging away at it until I can get the gist of what each thing does. I understand setting up tags for specific links. I can get their trigger to fire. But those triggered tags are difficult to find in Analytics.
Understanding program coding can be very rewarding once the understanding kicks in. Until then there is a lot of frustration. Back to the tutorials!?!