I have seen too many founders who are smart, legit, and ambitious get ghosted by investors simply because they couldn't walk through their unit economics.

It's not personal. It's math.

So here it is: Numbers that will either carry your pitch or quietly kill it, explained by someone who has sat through them time and time again, with examples, and no fluff.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• 1. Burn Rate: How Fast Are You Lighting Your Cash on Fire?

• 2. Cash Runway: How Long Before You Run Out of Cash?

• 3. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): How Much Does it Cost to Convince Someone to Pay You?

• 4. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How Much is One Customer Worth Over Time?

• 5. Gross Profit Margin: What Do You Actually Keep After Delivering Your Service or Product?

• 6. Monthly / Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR / ARR)

• 7. Churn Rate: How Fast Are Your Users Leaving

• 8. Payback Period: How Long Before You Recover Your CAC?

• 9. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA)

• 10. Valuation: What’s Your Company Worth – and What Supports that Number?

• Real Talk Before You Close That Tab

  • Real Experience

  • Why This Matters

• Conclusion and Final Thoughts

1. Burn Rate: How Fast Are You Lighting Your Cash on Fire?

Burn rate is the speed at which a startup is spending its cash. Basically, how fast are you consuming your venture capital to cover over overhead until you generate positive cash flow from operations? It’s a measure of negative cash flow.

If you’re spending $80K a month to keep the lights on (payroll, AWS, your workspace snacks, and so on), that’s how much cash you’re burning each month. But many startups calculate two different burn rates: gross burn (how much cash you’re spending, ignoring any revenue), and net burn (monthly operating experiences minus any cash you take in each month). Net burn basically measures how fast your cash is shrinking, and it’s often what investors care more about.

Real talk: investors want to know when the plane runs out of fuel before they board. Thats what this metric helps them understand – how fast you’re going through the money you have.

At some point, if a company has a high burn rate, it has to reduce structural costs by cutting expenditures on labor, rent, marketing, and/or capital equipment. The burn rate is an important metric for any company, but it's particularly important for startups that aren't yet generating revenue. It tells managers and investors how fast the company is spending its capital

Watch this video to understand more about Burn Rate.

2. Cash Runway: How Long Before You Run Out of Cash?

Cash runway tells how long a startup can continue to operate at a certain burn rate until they are out of cash. For startups without revenue, you can calculate this by dividing available cash by total monthly expenses. Available cash is defined as the funds that are accessible now or can be accessed at a later time relatively quickly to pay for expenses.

When you’re making this calculation, it’s important to not include any anticipated fundraising and other uncertain sources of capital.

Actively managing cash runway is crucial for startup survival and growth. With a significant percentage of startups failing due to cash shortages, founders need to closely monitor their cash burn rate and runway.

The length of runway needed varies based on factors including the startup’s stage, industry, and milestones. In tighter venture capital markets, startups should plan for longer runways and consider strategies such as increasing revenue, reducing expenses, or raising additional capital. Regularly updating financial models and understanding metrics like the burn multiple can help you make informed decisions to extend your runway and align your growth ambitions with financial stability.

While it’s a simple calculation at face value, a cash runway analysis is nuanced and unique to every startup and can be impacted by a multitude of circumstances.

To calculate this, you just divide your total cash reserves by the amount you’re spending each month. Say you’ve got $250K in the bank and you’re spending $50K/month: 250/50 = 5. So you’ve got 5 months. Not 6. Not “it depends” – 5. That’s your runway.

Investors ask “If we don’t fund you, how long do you survive?” If you don’t know that answer, you're not fundraising – you’re freelancing with hope.

Here is a video that explains cash runway with real world examples and the thought process behind it.

And here’s an article from JP Morgan breaking down cash runway, its importance, and what can you to to maximize it.

Burn Rate vs Runway

So, let’s just make this super clear: burn rate is simply how much you spend each month to run your operation – that is, your negative cash flow. Runway is how many months there are left before your bank balance reaches zero.

So again, why do these numbers matter?

Because burn rate tells you how quickly you need to find more revenue or funding. Runway tells investors whether you are going to still be around by the time they finish their due diligence.

They are not just numbers. They are your survival clock.

Smart founders utilize these metrics to:

• Trim the fat without cutting muscle – know what to focus on and what to let go

• Forecast hiring/fundraising deadlines – know the process and prep for it. Numbers don’t line but they sure can get you ghosted.

• Assure investors you’re not going to come knocking again in 90 days – establishing credibility is key, make an investor realize its not just a hobby, you mean business.

The goal: Extend runway without stalling momentum. Keep the plane in the air, while building a bigger engine.

3. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): How Much Does it Cost to Convince Someone to Pay You?

Cost of acquisition refers to the entire cost that a business incurs to obtain a new client or asset. This includes the purchase price, shipping, installation, and marketing costs for the asset acquired. CAC takes into account the total expenditure on all marketing, advertising, and sales for the period, which you then divide by the number of new customers for the period.

In this case, all the upfront costs incurred to purchase a business asset, including equipment or inventory, are part of the cost of acquisition. Cost of acquisition includes:

• Purchase price of the item

• Costs to ship it to its point of use

• Costs to install the item

• Costs to get it up and running (in the case of equipment) or ready for sale (in the case of inventory) condition

• Marketing sales teams salaries

• All sales and consulting marketing expenses geared to get new consumers should all be included

Formula:
CAC = (Total Marketing + Sales Expenses) / Number of New Customers Acquired

Say you spent $10K last month across paid ads, content creation, outbound campaigns, and sales team costs. You onboarded 100 new customers, so your CAC = $100.

But is that good?

It depends on:

• Your pricing model (one-time vs. subscription)

• Your margin (how much of that sale do you actually keep?)

• Your customer retention (how long do they stick around?)

If you’re selling a $20 product once, a $100 CAC is a non-starter. But if that customer brings in $50/month for 12 months, you’ve got a solid return.

Watch for red flags:

• CAC is rising but revenue isn’t

• You’re overly reliant on paid ads (especially if organic/referral is flat)

• You don’t know CAC by channel (averages hide leaks)

A healthy CAC is one that pays itself back quickly and can be improved over time as you optimize funnels and messaging

Here is a video that breaks down CAC for you.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How Much is One Customer Worth Over Time?

Customer Lifetime Value is the average monetary value of each customer to your business. LTV takes into account how much a unique customer is expected to spend with your business. It’s an important metric so you know how much new customers are worth to your business over their lifespan as a customer.

Let’s say you charge $25/month. The average customer sticks around 12 months.
LTV = $300.

In this case, if your CAC is $80? You’re in the green. But if it’s $350? You’re basically paying people to hang out (and losing money on them).

Now, let’s connect this to CAC.

Say your CAC is $80. You’re doing fine – your LTV is ~4x CAC. That’s what investors want to see.

Rule of thumb: you want your LTV to be at least 3x your CAC. A 1:1 ratio means you’re barely breaking even, before operational costs and the math stops working at scale. So if you can hit a 3:1 ratio, great – and based off my experience, your business will be much more appealing if it’s closer to 5:1.

And keep in mind that different models can have different thresholds. For example, a SaaS company with low churn can afford higher CACs, while an e-commerce platform might need faster payback. And marketplaces and freemium models may have lower LTV per user, but they can often more easily offset it with volume.

If you don’t know your LTV or can’t defend it with data, it becomes hard to justify spend – and easy for investors to walk.

If you want to know more, this video walks you through the basics.

And here’s a video that beautifully explains the CAC and LTV relationship.

5. Gross Profit Margin: What Do You Actually Keep After Delivering Your Service or Product?

Gross profit margin shows the amount of money a business collects after it pays for all its expenses. It’s usually calculated as a percentage of sales. This specific metric is also referred to as the gross margin ratio.

Companies use gross margin as a measure of how production costs relate to revenue. If a company's gross margin falls because it is making less revenue, it may try to cut labor costs, find cheaper suppliers of materials, or increase prices to increase revenue.

Gross profit margins can also allow a business to measure how efficient a company is, or compare two very differently sized companies that share a common revenue stream or product

If you sell a subscription for $50/month and it costs you $10/month to host, maintain, and support it, your gross margin is 80%.

• Good: SaaS companies often hit 70–90%.

• Bad: If you're below 30%, your "scalable" business will collapse under weight.

Want to know the conceptual math behind this metric and how it differs from Profit Margin? Here is a fantastic video that easily breaks it down.

6. Monthly / Annual Recurring Revenue (MRR / ARR)

Annual recurring revenue (ARR) is revenue a company expects to see from its product and service offerings, calculated over the course of a year. Companies that sell annual subscriptions like using ARR as a sales metric to track what they anticipate making in a year.

ARR tends to be used if companies sell a product or service in the software as a service (SaaS) space, but it can also be useful in terms of streaming services, cell phone bills, and (almost) anything else with a predictable, recurring charge.

ARR is calculated annually, whereas monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is calculated monthly. MRR is useful in that it shows what’s happening on a month-to-month basis. For example, if you change your price in April, you can see the immediate effects of that change in May. MRR also helps track fluctuations in revenue based on outside factors like holiday shopping seasons and economic conditions.

In a nutshell, Monthly / Annual Recurring Revenue = predictable income.

If you’re pulling $20K/month in subscriptions, that’s $240K ARR. Simple.

What investors care about:

• • Is it growing?

    • How fast?

    • And how stable is it?

Here is a founder breaking down the metric and explaining the relationship between MRR/ARR.

7. Churn Rate: How Fast Are Your Users Leaving

The churn rate, also known as attrition rate, represents the rate at which a customer stops doing business with a company. Customer churn is typically expressed as the percentage of service subscribers that discontinue their service subscriptions within a time frame. Churn can also be expressed as the rate at which employees leave their jobs in a given time.

In order for a business to grow its number of clients, its growth rate (which takes into account new customers) must be higher than its churn rate.

The benefit of calculating a churn rate is that it can clarify how well a business is retaining its customers, which is a measure of the quality of service the business is providing and the usefulness of that service.

When a business can see its churn rate increasing from period to period, this suggests that a critical aspect of how it is running the business might be problematic or flawed.

It could be the result of:

• A faulty product(s)

• Bad customer service

• Costs exceed utility to customers

And so on.

The churn rate will indicate to a business that it needs to learn why its customers are leaving, and where it needs to adjust its business. It’s more expensive to attract new customers than it is to retain them, so reducing the churn rate can save a business resources in the future.

Real talk: Say you had 500 users at the start of the month, and you lost 50 by the end of the month. That’s 10% churn – which is high! Annualize that and…ouch. You're not growing. You're replacing.

Make sure you fix this before you fundraise. Or at least explain why churn’s high and what you’re doing to plug the holes.

Here is a video that beautifully explains Churn Rate.

8. Payback Period: How Long Before You Recover Your CAC?

The payback period is a popular tool for determining investment return. People invest money for the purpose of getting it back and generating a positive return on the money they invested. The shorter the payback period, the more beneficial the investment will be.

The payback period does not factor in the time value of money. You can determine it simply by counting the number of years until the principal paid in is returned.

This metric measures how quickly your customer pays you back for the cost of acquiring them. The payback period doesn’t take into account the total profitability of an investment. It’s just concerned with paying the investment back.

There are two common interpretations:

1. Customer-Level Payback: If your CAC is $250 and your customer pays $50/month, it’ll take 5 months to recover the acquisition cost.

2. Investment-Level Payback: You spend $100,000 on a new sales hire, tool stack, or feature. You want to know how long it takes for that investment to generate $100,000 in profit.

Both use the same principle: the shorter the payback period, the less cash you need to float your growth.

If you want a target, aim for 6 months for customer-level payback. Closer to 3-6 is ideal. Long payback periods mean you need deep pockets – or exceptional retention – to stay afloat.

Here’s a video where you can learn more.

9. Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA)

EBITDA stands for Earning Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. You can think of this as just your company's operating profit if you wanted a very rudimentary way of referring to it.

It’s not flashy. It’s not fun. But it tells investors: “Here’s what we really make once the accounting fog clears.” and “Are we generating real profits from our actual operations?”

EBITDA is what investors look at because it is the best way of comparing apples to apples when considering startups. EBITDA can provide investors a measure of your operational health.

A negative EBITDA for an early stage company isn't going to raise any eyebrows. Just don’t act surprised when someone brings it up. You need to do that math before the pitch. But, if you have a growing early stage company that's moving from negative EBITDA to positive? Now your getting into grown folks business.

Here’s a video that explains the basics of EBITDA.

And here’s another video that explains how investors look at EBITDA and its value in determining your business’s worth.

10. Valuation: What’s Your Company Worth – and What Supports that Number?

Valuation is a focused exercise that determines the value of an asset, investment, or company. So, how much your company’s worth. And the goal is typically to determine whether that value is a fair value.

Valuations can be conducted in one of two ways:

• an absolute valuation, which evaluates a company on its own merits and entirely independently of other factors/companies, or

• a relative valuation, which evaluates the company relative to other similar firms, or assets, in the same sector or industry. This determines if the company, or asset, is worth that much relative to others.

Depending on how the analysis and conclusions are reached, there are a variety of methods and techniques used to develop valuations. And as you’d expect, there’s often significant variability between outputs (or valuations) based on the inputs and context.

While valuations are predominantly quantitatively driven, there’s often a significant subjective influence that come from the assumptions and estimates made along the way. Valuations are also subject to developing situations and events outside of the analysis or the control of the analyst – for example, earnings reports or material news, or economic news – that can result in a change to a valuation stance.

If you’re pre-revenue and you’re saying $30M because a friend raised at that, please stop. Their experience likely has nothing to do with yours.

Valuation = traction + market comps + revenue + momentum + team.

Valuation isn’t just about what you want – it’s about what you can defend.

Startups are typically valued using:

• Comparable Analysis (Comps): What similar companies are worth

• Discounted Cash Flow (DCF): Projecting future cash and discounting it back

• Revenue Multiples: Often 5x–10x for SaaS, but varies wildly

• Precedent Transactions: What investors paid in past rounds for similar startups

But that’s the math.

Here’s the messy truth: Valuation = Traction + Team + TAM (total addressable market) + Timing + Storytelling.

Hard factors:

• MRR/ARR

• Growth rate

• Churn

• CAC:LTV

• Gross margins

Soft factors:

• Founding team’s track record

• Market momentum

• Hype or scarcity

Don’t inflate. Don’t anchor to your friend’s raise. Know your comps. And show why your model is defensible, not just desirable. Inflated numbers make investors run. They don’t correct you – they just ghost you.

There are numerous books written on valuation and each technique could be its own PhD. But my role here is to give you a sneak peak into the metrics.

Here’s a basic video on valuation if you’re interested in a deeper dive.

And here’s a more detailed video course outlining different forms of valuation. Professor Damodaran from New York University is considered to be one of the aces and thought leaders when it comes to valuation. In this video course he explains stepwise and beautifully so you can understand and explore the fascinating world of valuations.

Real Talk Before You Close That Tab

Real Experience

I met a founder once – early days, rough product, but you could tell he actually cared. He wasn't trying to look good. No buzzwords. No "disrupt" talk. Just someone trying to solve something annoying and important.

He walked into the room with a twinkle. Not swagger – just that gentle intensity. We were leaning in.

Then, in the middle of the pitch, someone asked, "So what's your monthly burn?" And I swear to you, he said, "Umm... I think my co-founder has that. I haven't looked in a while."

That was it.

No freak out. No awkward pause. Just... a cluck. Like a window closing in the background.

The product? Still smart. But the moment? Gone.

Nobody was mad. Nobody laughed. We even said thank you. But nobody followed up.

Why? Because it didn't feel like a business. It felt like a maybe.

Why This Matters

I’ve seen so many versions of that same scene play out. It’s never about charisma. It’s not even about the idea, half the time.

It’s about whether the person asking for money actually knows what they’re building. Not the dream, the mechanics. The guts, nuts and bolds of the business. The ugly Excel math nobody brags about on Twitter.

Unfortunately, no simple pitch deck will do that part for you. No co-founder can answer those questions on your behalf.

If it’s your vision, own the math. If it’s your company, learn the cost of keeping it alive.

The rest? The logos, the taglines, the “go-to-market” plans?.... All of that’s just packaging.

And you don’t have to be perfect either. You just have to be in it. Eyes open. Numbers in your head.
Because if you’re asking people to believe in what you’re building, you’d better believe in the scaffolding holding it up.

So yeah, know your CAC. Your LTV. Your margins. Your churn. Not to check some box on an investor’s sheet, but to prove to yourself and the investor that the thing you’re spending your life on…has legs. That it can stand. And run.

And maybe, someday, outlast you. Maybe!

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

I hope this was helpful to you, especially if you’re a founder or aspiring founder trying to build the next big thing. While there a many more ratios and concepts, these are the crux of them.

A lot of other complex ratios and valuations are either built using these metrics or refer them in some way. And each of these metrics could be an article of its own. But I wanted to give you my top 10 run down so that you could get a head start. Numbers are very much a part of the ideation stage itself, and omitting them from your strategy could prove to be a fatal mistake.

I’ll leave you with one last video on How to Start a Start Up with Michael Seibel (Reddit, YC, Twitch) that I hope you find valuable. It lays out, in a crash course format, the mindset of a founder who has been there and done that. The fun fact is that a lot of the themes he speaks of tie in to the metrics here, directly or indirectly.

I hope this gives you a perspective of being on the other side, evaluating your hard work and passion, and I hope it sets you up for success in your next Investor Review.

I look forward to your thoughts, comments, and feedback. If this was helpful, engaging, and informative, do share it – you never know who may need it, or could benefit from it. I wish you all the very best in your funding rounds.

Until then, keep learning, unlearning, and relearning, folks.

Sandy wrangling

What is Google Tag Manager?

If you’ve ever worked with any kind of analytics software, or you have worked with a marketing team before, you’ve probably heard the word pixel thrown around. A pixel is literally what it sounds like: a 1x1 image that sends information to a server through an image request.

Google Analytics pixel request

Though pixels are still common, many teams have moved towards small javascript snippets that sit right along side the rest of your HTML. They will allow software like Google Analytics to run their own scripts on your page, sometimes even with a pixel backup, in the event that a browser doesn't run JavaScript.

Crazy Egg snippet

These pixels and snippets work great. But when you’re dealing with a bunch of them and they all use the same data, it might seem like you’re just adding to an unmanageable mess of single use code snippets that never feel like they’re in the right place.

Google Tag Manager, or GTM, is a software solution to manage these pixels and snippets for you. To start, GTM works pretty much like any of those other code snippets, as it’s a code snippet itself. But where it shines is that you get to manage the rest of those pixels and snippets along with the flow of data inside GTM, leaving it to be the only snippet to manage within your code.

Why do I want to use it?

Fewer code changes, Fewer deploys

Most of the time, if you’re managing these snippets in your code, each change will require another merge request and another deploy to get the changes out. Not only does this add more risk, as you need to make yet another change to the code, but this is additional time spent dealing with your deploy pipeline and making sure everything is working as it should be.

GTM allows you to break outside of that flow, giving you more flexibility to get changes out that could give some needed insight into fixing some UI errors or could add a few bucks to the bottom line.

More manageable data flow

Wrangling all the different variables throughout your application, making sure they’re all available in the right spot, and keeping up with avoiding breaking any changes can prove to be challenging. This also makes your code more fragile and prone to breaking.

Google Tag Manager utilizes what they call a dataLayer, which essentially functions like an array of events that it listens to. This allows you to push or seed new data to make available within GTM itself. And it means you’re funneling all of your variables to one spot in the code. This lets whoever manages GTM do the rest – they can use that data with peace of mind, knowing that your data flow won’t break after forgetting to update 1 out of 10 spots.

Ability to give marketers a little more access

This is an opportunity to free up some of your time by letting the marketing team deal with tag changes themselves rather than you being the middle man for them. Perhaps they need to adjust the ID for your analytics software or maybe they want to add Crazy Egg. With the right permissions (explained later), they can do all of the work and send the changes to you for review before publishing them.

How does this relate to Google Analytics?

There is no direct relation. But along with Google Analytics, GTM is another tool in the Google Marketing Platform and gives you the immediate ability to more easily manage your Google Analytics installation. GA comes with prebuilt tags inside GTM that make it a breeze to set up.

What else can I use this for?

Google Analytics is just one of many code snippets this can be used for. Ideally, you’re not going to write your entire site here. But you have the ability to pretty much do whatever you want on your own site as long as Google doesn’t deem it malware.

Some other use cases include:

• Traffic visualization with Crazy Egg or Hot Jar
• Conversion and remarketing pixels with Google Ads
• A/B Testing with Google Optimize or AB Tasty
• Client side error tracking (and logging them)
• GDPR compliance management

There are many baked-in like the examples above, meaning you don’t even need to mess with code. Just add the IDs or settings and go. But for whatever custom solution or tag you need, you can always set up the HTML manually.

Anything I need to know before jumping in?

Before jumping right in, let’s familiarize ourselves with a few key terms that will make this ride a little easier.

Tags

Tags in GTM are your pixels or code snippets. A tag includes a single instance of a contained piece of code that is used for one function.

Example: your Google Analytics snippet will be one tag and if you add Crazy Egg, that will be another tag.

Variables

A variable is a name that you give a predetermined or dynamic value. The variable can be based on a variety of different things, hence the name “variable”. But it will function as a single name that you can give and reference that will never change when using it.

Example: we’ll set up your Google Analytics ID as a variable, meaning you’ll use that variable within the GA tag itself. If you ever need to update that ID, you won’t need to modify the tag or any other tags that use the variable – you’ll only need to update the variable itself.

Triggers

Triggers are the event or action that make your tag fire or load. This can happen in a variety of ways, such as when all or a specific page loads, when something is clicked, or when you have a completely custom event you fire with Javascript.

Example: when we set up Google Analytics, our trigger will be when any page loads.

Container

GTM allows you to manage multiple “containers” or groups of tags within your organization. This is helpful when you have one company with a few different website properties.

Example: you’re a small company under a parent company. The parent company wants to maintain one organization, but each smaller company gets their own container, as they have their individual needs for tags and code snippets.

How do I get set up?

Getting your account set up

The first thing you’ll need to do is get your account set up. After getting to the tag manager homepage, you’ll probably want to use your preexisting Google account. If you’re in an organization setting it up for the organization, you most likely want to use your business email, otherwise your personal account works okay too.

Next, create a new GTM account:

Google Tag Manager new account

Once there, fill out the form appropriately. The Account Name should represent the top level of your hierarchy and the container name should represent the specific installation instance.

Google Tag Manager new account container

As for the target platform, choose whichever makes sense. If it’s a website or web app, Web makes the most sense here.

Finding and installing your snippet

As soon as you accept the terms and hit create, you’ll be presented with a snippet in a little modal. You'll want to do exactly what it says and install the snippets per the instructions.

Google Tag Manager install snippet

Didn’t get the screen or accidentally exited out? You can find your snippet again by navigating to Admin in the top navbar and then click Install Google Tag Manager under Container to the right.

Testing that it’s working

To make sure it’s working, let’s verify a few things:

• We created our account
• We created our container
• We installed the Google Tag Manager snippets on our page and the change are live

Once all of those things are true, go ahead and click the Preview button in the top right of the page.

Google Tag Manager preview

If successful, you’ll now see an orange banner at the top of the page that says you’re in Preview Mode:

Google Tag Manager preview mode

Now wander over to the website that you installed GTM on and you should now see a banner at the bottom of the page. This will serve as your Debugger for working with GTM’s Preview.

Google Tag Manager debugger

You should see something similar to that, which means it worked! ?

Note: if you have an ad blocker on, similar to GA, you may need to disable it on the page you’re installing on in order to see it working.

Cool, it’s working, what about Google Analytics?

Now that we have a basic installation of GTM working, let’s set up Google Analytics. First we'll want to do some prep, so let's jump back over to the Tag Manager dashboard.

Create a settings variable

Navigate to Variables in the left sidebar and then click New beside User-Defined Variables.

Google Tag Manager new variable

For the name, enter “GA Settings” and under Variable Type, click through and select Google Analytics Settings. Enter your Google Analytics Tracking ID (or Property ID) in the appropriate field, and finally click Save, at which point you have your new settings variable.

Create a new GA tag

Navigate to Tags in the left sidebar and then click New beside Tags.

Google Tag Manager new tag

For the name, enter “GA - All Pages”. Under Tag Type, click and select Google Analytics: Universal Analytics in the panel that pops out from the right.

After selecting the tag type, under Google Analytics Settings, select your variable from the previous step, which if you followed along will be called “GA Settings”.

Next, click in the middle of the Triggering box, which should open a new UI to select a trigger.

Google Tag Manager trigger

Select All Pages, which should be the only Trigger there if you’re in a new account. It will take you back to the New Tag UI with your newly selected trigger.

Once the above is done, click Save in the top right of the UI which will then save and create your new Google Analytics tag.

Test that GTM is working

Similar to when we installed GTM to begin with, let’s go back to the Workspace home by clicking Overview in the left sidebar. Then click Preview at the top right.

Google Tag Manager debugger with Google Analytics

Open up your page GTM is installed on and you should once again see your Debugger, but this time with the Google Analytics Tag loading.

Are we done yet?

Not quite. Although we have GA working, we need to tweak the configuration to make sure GA and GTM work correctly together.

Updating the page snippet

Let’s dig into the code one more time to update our Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager snippets.

The issue with the installation that we set up here is that we installed GA through the GA instructions and GA inside GTM. This means we have GA installed twice. In practice, GA may send 1 pageview from your default installation and then another via GTM. To avoid this, we want to remove the pageview from the default GA snippet.

If you just have a super basic default installation, I did the work for you and you can go ahead and copy the snippet below. Replace [YOUR GA PROPERTY ID] with your GA Property ID and [YOUR GTM CONTAINER ID] with your GTM Container ID, and swap it out for your existing GA and GTM installation on your page.

<script>
// Set up an initial dataLayer configuration
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [{
  "gaPropertyId": "[YOUR GA PROPERTY ID]"
}];

// Configure gtag and your GA ID
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', '[YOUR GA PROPERTY ID]');

// Google Tag Manager snippet
(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src=
'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl+'&gtm_cookies_win=x';f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,'script','dataLayer', '[YOUR GTM CONTAINER ID]');
</script>

This should REPLACE your current Google Analytics snippet if you have one. If you don't, this should go as far in the top of your <head> tag as you can, but under the charset meta tag.

For more advanced users, just make sure you’re not sending duplicate pageviews or duplicate events between the page snippet and any GTM tag you create.

Test that GA is working

Follow the steps above to make sure GA is showing up with the debugger.

The final thing you’ll want to do is make sure your installation is working using Google’s Tag Assistant extension. Once you install the extension, go back to your page and click Enable in the Extension’s UI.

Google Tag Assistant enable recording

Refresh the page and you should see 2 tags, GA and GTM.

Google Tag Assistant results

If you notice, my GA tag is blue and yours may be too. Click in to Google Analytics for more info.

Google Tag Assistant non-standard implementation

As you can see, we have a healthy 1 Pageview Request and a note that says Non-standard implementation (hence the blue) This is because we installed it with GTM instead of the default on page.

Publish and Deploy!

We’re there! Last step is to Publish your Container and make the changes live.

Google Tag Manager submit version

Click Submit in the Overview UI, enter a name and description.

Google Tag Manager version configuration

Finally click Publish and your changes will be live on your site!

What else do I need to know?

There’s plenty more to talk through, but that’s for a different day. There are a ton of resources online to get you started with adding your own new tags and exploring the capabilities of Google Analytics, but here are a few points to keep in mind with GTM.

Permissions

You most likely don’t want every marketer on your 1,000 person team to have publish access to your GTM container. It’s best to have one or a few people responsible for managing the container, reviewing, and publishing while keeping everyone else to a lower access role. This will help prevent accidental changes or abuse within a bigger team.

Security

Permissions are your first step towards maintaining a secure installation. But Google takes this an extra step and performs some actions for you, such as checking for code errors and scanning for malware. While this is great, it’s still important to keep an active review cycle of tags getting published, just like any other pieces of code, to make sure the site integrity and health remain in tact.

Conventions

I highly recommend starting early with naming conventions and best practices when configuring your tags, variables, triggers, and really anything within GTM. The different ways to name things can spiral out of control really quickly, depending on how many people are working in there. This will make your work difficult to find, so it’s best to agree with the team on a convention to use early and get off on the right foot.

Single Page Apps

This doesn’t account for the impact single page apps have on a GTM and GA setup. The trigger we set up here will fire when any page loads, which is defined by a new page load by the browser. Single page apps don’t actually load a new page – rather, the JavaScript within the app makes it appear that a new page loads, so the trigger here will only fire the first pageview. Though it doesn’t include information directly usable in GTM, the GA documentation has some good information about tracking these types of apps.

GDPR

While GTM alone does not (currently) violate GDPR, you still need to be cognizant of how any of the tags you use impact your standing. This guide doesn’t touch this, so please make sure to do your homework.

Exiting out of Debugger

Stuck? One way is to clear your cookies, but you should always be able to go to the GTM Overview page and hit "Leave Preview Mode” right under the orange Preview Mode banner at the top of the page.

What's next?

From here, you can start managing your tags and pixels through GTM, which allows you to have a single source of consistent data flow into those tags. Experiment and use the debugger to play around, as it opens the door for a lot of new ways to work with the marketing side of things.

Originally published at https://www.colbyfayock.com/2019/11/how-to-use-google-tag-manager-to-maintain-google-analytics-and-other-marketing-tags

I’m going to cover a few things here. If you’re already familiar with the basics, feel free to skip around:

• What is Google Analytics? (A quick overview)
• Okay, so where do I start? (Quick start install guide)
• What are some quick insights? (Basic out of the box reports)
• Bonus: Advanced Insights (Custom Dimensions)

So let’s start from the top.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics gives you the tools you need to better understand your customers. You can then use those business insights to take action, such as improving your website, creating tailored audience lists, and more. - Google's official documentation

More simply put, Google Analytics (GA) is a web analytics service provided by Google on the Google Marketing Platform. It allows you to track and measure your website’s traffic with powerful insights and reports.

GA can work a few different ways, but the most common is using a quick drop-in JavaScript snippet that goes on every page of your website (typically the <head>).

Google Analytics lets you measure user interaction with websites.

The base version of Google Analytics is free. You have the option of upgrading to the 360 suite, which will open up some feature limits, but most of you probably don’t need this as it is more geared towards high traffic websites.

Why do I need Google Analytics?

You don’t need it. But you can get an incredible amount of insight from GA with even a basic out of the box setup.

GA is helpful if you're a developer trying to get more traffic out of your blog, or a business trying to optimize your sales funnel.

GA helps you answer simple questions like:

• Where is my traffic coming from?
• What pages get the most traffic?
• What are the most popular devices people visit on?

Not only can this help you make better-educated decisions with your website. It can also help you unveil user experience concerns, or save money due to site issues by keeping an eye on traffic trends and user interactions.

Okay, so where do I start?

Google makes it’s fairly easy for any developer to jump in and get started. The only real prerequisite is that you set up an account. Google themselves offers a great step-by-step and constantly updated guide, so I’ll leave it to them.

Getting the tag on your page

Once you’re logged into the Google Analytics Dashboard, go to the Admin section, which you can find on the left hand side of the page:

Admin link in the Google Analytics Dashboard

Once in the admin section, you can navigate to Tracking Info then Tracking code under the property you want to track.

Tracking code link in the Google Analytics Admin

Finally, you can find the JavaScript snippet that you can throw in the head of your website. Remember, this should be on ALL pages.

Google Analytic tracking code snippet

Let the traffic flow

From here you just have to give it time. Google Analytics won’t have historical data, it will only have the the new traffic that hit your page once the snippet was installed.

You can check it’s working by visiting the Realtime Report and either hitting the page in another tab or seeing your visitors hit the page.

Google Analytics Realtime Report

More settings, more configuration

Google Analytics is a complex machine and can do a lot. Start slow and try to understand what’s happening before moving too fast turning every different switch.

Once you're comfortable, there are a lot of great guides out there for beginners and advanced users alike to unleash the full power of your reporting capabilities.

Goku going Super Saiyan

What are some quick insights?

Cool, so you have GA installed, you see your traffic, and you’re ready to get started looking at your reports, but where to begin?

What pages get the most traffic?

Let’s start with a simple one. Which pages of my website are getting the most traffic? To find this out we’ll want to view the Behavior Overview, which we can find by visiting Behavior then Overview.

Finding top page on Google Analytics Behavior Overview Report

Above we’re looking at the full month of August, which you can change with the date picker in the top right of the report. We can see overall, we had 3,853,265 total pageviews and 121,187 of them were to /news, the freeCodeCamp News homepage, which was our most popular page of the month.

Where is my traffic coming from?

A common question is: “where are people coming from?” How are people actually finding my website? This is a 2 parter, let’s start with overall traffic.

A good way to start is by finding the Acquisition Overview page. You can navigate there by selecting Acquisition than Overview.

Finding top traffic source on Google Analytics Acquisition Overview Report

Shown above, the majority of traffic comes from organic searches on Google, a little over 75% in fact. That’s some good SEO!

Outstanding Move

But what if we wanted to see how people are getting to a particular post? This involves a little more work, but let’s dive in.

Let’s go back to Behavior in the sidebar, then Site Content, and finally Landing Pages. Once there, you can use the search to find your post as shown below and select it.

Searching for a page on the Google Analytics Landing Page Report

After you found your post, we’re going to add a Secondary dimension. In particular, we’ll want to find and select “Source / Medium” in the Secondary dimension dropdown.

Adding a Secondary dimension on the Google Analytics Landing Page Report

Finally we’ll have an idea of where people are coming from to visit our post.

Finding the top Source / Medium on the Google Analytics Landing Page Report

It seems like this is following the trend of great Organic SEO. If you notice though, we have “(direct) / (none)” as the second highest source / medium.

Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy. And if Google Analytics can’t figure out where the user came from, it will mark it as “(direct) / (none)”. While that’s solvable, and sometimes actually means something, we can see the majority comes from simple searches on Google itself.

What are the most popular devices people visit on?

Understanding what devices your visitors are using is an incredibly helpful tool for optimizing User Experience, as well as maximizing potential revenue by making sure your site works.

In a perfect world, your website would work in all browsers. But we may be able to safely rule out certain older browsers.

Internet Explorer behind a tree

To get started, find your way to Audience then Overview. Once there, select Browsers in the list as shown below.

Finding the top browser in the Google Analytics Acquisition Report

We can see that luckily, our top browsers are dominated by modern ones, with Chrome carrying a cool 76.42%.

But wait, Internet Explorer is pulling 1.06% or 22,499, which isn’t something to bat an eye at. So let’s dig in a little more by clicking on Internet Explorer.

Finding the traffic for Internet Explorer versions in the Google Analytics Acquisition Browser Report

Phew, I think we’re safe. Now we can see how many people visit each version of Internet Explorer and luckily almost 99% of THAT traffic is IE9 or above. While we should be as inclusive as we can, this can help us determine priority and make decisions on what browser versions to officially support.

Real talk: 5 people on IE5? ?

Bonus: Advanced Insights

Out of the box, Google Analytics is powerful, but with some customization and deeper integration with your web data, you can give your analytics dashboard extra superpowers.

Darkwing Duck Let's Get Dangerous

Custom Dimensions

Custom Dimensions are what Google specifies as “non-standard data.” Really, they’re just additional data points that we can configure to get a better understanding of what makes our website unique.

For the sake of this article (maybe a later one), I’m not going to go into how to add Custom Dimensions, but Google provides a great guide to get an in depth understanding and a developer guide to go with it. What I’ll go over here is how to explore our reports once some Custom Dimensions are already set up.

What are our Custom Dimensions?

To start, we’ll talk about 2 specific Custom Dimensions: Author and Page Category.

Author is what it sounds like, it’s the person who wrote the article. Page Category in our case is the primary, top-level category that represents the post.

On freeCodeCamp News, you can specify as many categories as you want (do so responsibly), but the first one in the list is consider your “primary” category and is used when you see your post in listing views such as the homepage.

Post on freeCodeCamp News Homepage

What can we do with these?

The great thing is when we set these up, we attribute them to a page view. Once that page view is collected by Google Analytics, we can use it to search on, which is really what makes it powerful. Let’s start with Author.

Finding all posts from a specific Author

If we wanted to search for any post written by Quincy Larson, we’ll want to navigate back to Behavior, then Site Content, and finally All Pages.

Once there, we’ll want to add a Secondary dimension, similar when we added Source / medium, but now we’ll want to search for and select Author, which you’ll also find nested under the Custom Dimensions heading of that dropdown.

Selecting Author as a Secondary dimension on the Google Analytics Behavior Report

From there, we’ll want to select Advanced on the right (highlighted below), add our author’s name, and finally hit the Apply button.

Searching for an Author in Advanced Search of Google Analytics Behavior Report

After hitting apply, we now have all the stats we could ever dream of for the articles written by our author, Quincy Larson.

All posts from an Author in Google Analytics Behavior Report

You can also just type a query into the Google Analytics Search Bar.

Google Analytics has a search bar at the top, and you can just type natural language queries like this one:

The results of a query for "articles by quincy larson past 30 days" shows the number of views each of Quincy's articles has gotten over the past 30 days.

Which categories are doing the best?

This is a trickier one. There are a lot of questions we may be able to answer with the basic reports like we did with Author, such as “out of all of the JavaScript posts, what has the most traffic?”, but maybe we want to know generally what category is the most popular on the site.

To do this we need to get our hands dirty with Custom Reports. This is too advanced to try to tackle in this post, but Google does a great job at outlining it in detail.

For now, I’ve done you a favor and set up a report that you can easily import to your account and use right away. So first thing’s first, let’s import the report: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=4fHol2S_TZqcQACAwfcmfg

Importing a Custom Report in Google Analytics

Here you should see a screen like the above that asks us 2 things: where should we apply the report and what do we want to call it? If you’re an author of freecodecamp.org with access to GA and want to view this, you would select the All Web Site Data view under the freeCodeCamp News property.

Selecting a Property and View when importing a Custom Report in Google Analytics

Once selected, name the report what you’d like, such as “Top Primary Categories”, and click Create.

Custom Report showing top Primary Categories in Google Analytics

After it’s done, you’ll then land on the newly imported custom report where you can immediately see the most popular categories on the site, which for August is JavaScript!

Breakdown

This was a lot!

Alan Rickman in Galaxy Quest sinking in chair

But this is just the tip of the data iceberg. Even with just the above, you can see there’s a lot going on and a lot of configuration to make the most out of Google Analytics for your specific needs.

If this interests you, I encourage you to do some research on your own, add a new view (particularly a Test View to play around with), and get your hands dirty poking around the different reports. Otherwise, keep an eye out for more of my GA posts covering advanced installation and deeper insights.

Originally published at https://www.colbyfayock.com/2019/09/making-sense-of-google-analytics-and-the-traffic-to-your-website