How to Track Ad Block Usage in Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager

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In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to add track sessions that have ad blocking enabled, through Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics (GA). Here’s a glance, similar to what you will see in your Google Analytics profile, after implementing the tag and variable in GTM. Data Preview Step 1 Click into your container. Step 2 Create a new Tag, as Custom HTML. This Javascript snippet will create a 1×1 ad unit that will always be triggered by an adblocker. It checks to see if the unit was able to be created and has a height, and if …

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How to Return an Empty Cell When the Value is Zero in Google Sheets

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If you’re anything like me, you want clean data and don’t want to show anything that may look wrong. In this instance, I have rows of data, but some rows may not have data yet and I want them to be ready for when they do have data. Instead of showing 0 for every field with no data, you can return an empty cell. Here’s how. In the cell you want to show the empty cell when no data, you first run the calculation to see if it returns any data. If it does, then show that data. If it …

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Using Cloudflare, an Amazon Load Balancer, with Nginx and Fail2Ban

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I recently started using WordOps as the primary infrastructure solution for my WordPress sites. I’ve been quite happy with it as well. I’ve been using Cloudflare for quite a while now, and have been extremely pleased with the product offering; even the free service is fantastic — I have also used Cloudflare as an Enterprise customer. More recently though, I’ve started to dive into Amazon Web Services (AWS) and started using their Load Balancer technology in my high availability WordPress infrastructure configuration. WordOps comes out of the box with a configuration file called cloudflare.conf inside of /etc/nginx/conf.d. This file comes …

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How to Automate WordPress Backups to Amazon S3 with a Bash Script

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I’ve been working with WordPress for almost 20 years now. Hosting has always been a pain in my side to properly handle scaling, caching, and delivery. Recently, I started using an Open Source product called WordOps and have been very impressed with it. The following WordPress backup script is tailored to the file structure of WordOps, but it can easily be customized to fit any need. To give you some basics of how I adapted this script. All my sites live in /var/www, such as /var/www/domain.com and furthermore, the main directories live in htdocs. For example, /var/www/domain.com/htdocs which is where …

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How to Track Light/Dark Mode in Google Analytics through Google Tag Manager

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Have you ever been on your phone late at night and you visit a web page and you’re suddenly blinded? Light and dark mode could ease that pain for your users, to give them a more pleasant experience. Thankfully, there is a CSS Media query which you can use to control it. Tracking visits at a session-level, whether they have light mode or dark mode enabled, could help give you some insight to see if visitors are even using that. This tutorial will walk you through how to track dark and light mode at a session-level within Google Analytics (GA), …

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How to Setup a VAST/VPAID Waterfall with VideoJS

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I was recently working on a project that required I setup a VAST/VPAID waterfall within VideoJS, and pass macros to be replaced on runtime to the ad tag. It was pretty tricky to get it working, but after much research, I was able to accomplish it. Here’s how I did it. Setting up VideoJS I first followed the instructions to setup VideoJS, plain vanilla, stock, just as-is and nothing fancy. Made sure that was working. I found this hosted mp4 video which is great for testing if you don’t want to eat up your own bandwidth. Setting up VideoJS Contrib Ads