So we have noticed a severe drop in users and traffic as reported by google analytics (like a 90% decrease). I looked through the data and it seemed to start around 10/22/2018. On 10/23 the year over year drop was 82% and continues steady evening jumping up higher (I saw one at 97% of a drop).
So I started frantically thinking/looking at what possibly could have changed around that time and I noticed that I downloaded and installed a Percussion patch on 10/22/2018. (cmPatch5315_20180816_201608R05). I can’t recall when it was installed but that day we saw a tiny dip in stats and then after that day a major persistent drop of stats.
I can’t recall any other major changes to the website during that week besides the patch upgrade so I can only jump to the conclusion something in the patch may be affecting Google Analytics? Did anyone else experience this issue.
We’ve been doing some other web work so I haven’t done the more recent patches yet. Anyone at Percussion recommend I wait on the patches for troubleshooting purposes or install the latest to see if it fixes the issues?
In CM1 patch 5315_20180621 we changed the way google analytics tags are injected in pages and templates. We removed the auto inject of Google Analytics Tag into Page templates for each site that is currently configured with the Gadget since this causes an issue for GDPR compliance as if customers opt-out in consent, we would be forcing the injection of analytics tags. We now are required to manually add the google analytics code into the page or template source.
Excerpt from the release notes of the patch. [CMS-4029] - Change Google Analytics Gadget to not inject JavaScript into Page Templates
The Google Analytics gadget has been changed to not inject tags into pages and templates. It is recommended that going forward customers apply Google Analytics tags to their pages and templates accordingly.
So we should manually add the google analytics tracking code to the “Additional head content” or before/after body section of our templates meta data section? Is that the recommendation?