The Solopreneur wears many hats
A little rant about how the unforeseen tends to eat away our time, and some Google Analytics 4 shenanigans.
Yesterday was one of those days.
You start with a list of stuff you want to accomplish.
Then, the unexpected rears its ugly head.
Those who already follow me know I’m a solopreneur and consultant.
A Software Engineer, turned into Customer Experience expert, but who also has devoted a lot of time to deep Computer Science stuff like Artificial Intelligence.
And with an MBA.
Everyday I wear many hats.
I have to.
So, I begun my day migrating some of my posts to Medium, because it has better discoverability.
And, you know… Content Marketing. Solopreneur. Many hats.
Then, I moved to make some tweaks to my Customer Experience webinar landing page.
(if you haven’t checked it yet, you should, it is FREE knowledge).
Before starting with the tweaks, I opened my Google Analytics dashboard, to check my current traffic and have a baseline for later comparisons.
And I noticed my custom events from Substack weren’t coming through.
If you also are a Substack writer, you know it provides very little information about traffic and your audience.
So, having the knowledge, one of the first things I did to my Substack was plugging it into Google Analytics.
Only to realize that the amount and type of information Substack reported to Google Analytics was as poor as the ones you could view in your Substack dashboard.
I wanted to know Likes, Restacks, Shares, Comments, etc!
But all I got were Page Views.
And those were a mix of myself editing my posts and people reading them.
Useless.
I decided that even if my publication is still growing, I would need that info over time, so better to start collecting it.
Rolled up my sleeves, created a Google Tag Manager container, connected it to Substack and started tinkering.
After a few headaches and a lot of reading, I got it working.
Now my Google Analytics dashboard could show me the amount of Real Page Views (not me editing posts), Likes, Restacks, Comments, Copied Links, Shares to Notes, Shares to Twitter (X now), etc.
This had been working great.
Until it wasn't.
And I just noticed it yesterday.
So, again, I rolled my sleeves and started the debug process, to find where the issue was.
I spent the better part of the day trying to find the issue in my Google Tag Manager configuration.
Until I remembered Google Analytics had announced some changes earlier this year, streamlining some technical stuff I won’t cover here.
And thinking about the changes, it came to me that perhaps having registered at the same time a Google Analytics ID and a Google Tag Manager on Substack could be the source of the problem.
So I removed the GA4 ID, and voilá!
The events started flowing again.
I took the opportunity to tweak some additional stuff, based on what I’ve learned during this year on Substack, and left it roaring like a well tuned engine.
But then, the day was gone, and my to do list was almost untouched.
Oh, well…
A solopreneur has to do what he has to do, right?
BTW, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Substack SEO, etc. isn’t the main topic of this publication.
But I’ve become pretty knowledgeable about it, out of necessity.
So, if you want some tips or instructions, drop me a line in the comments and I’ll be happy to help.
Thank you for reading, and see you next time!
When you are ready, here is how I can help:
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