Measure Summit is virtual, but the energy in the chat was anything but. Analytics professionals logged in from around the world, the questions kept coming long after the session ended, and almost every follow-up conversation circled back to the same theme: the Data Manager API has arrived, and we have to be ready for it. (slides) If you joined us live, this is the version you can drop into Slack in the morning. If you missed it, this is the short take, with the references and

Google has informed the industry that we're going to see some significant changes in Google Tag Manager and Google Tags this summer. In addition to what's coming up in Google Marketing Live, here's a little more colour to help you see the direction of travel. May 2026 - UI Refresh No functionality is being removed, but you'll see an easier to use interface - more than just a welcome refresh. The UI hasn't seen any significant change for a couple of years so this will be pleas

The Reports snapshot is the first thing you see when you open GA4. It's meant to be a quick pulse check on your site. The trouble is, for most businesses, what GA shows by default isn't always what you need to see. It's easy to miss this as a setup option. Easy to glance at, nod, and move on. And as you're making decisions based on it, that's a problem worth fixing. Here's how to put it right in a couple of minutes. Finding the edit button Open your Reports snapshot and look

If you have ever tried to debug server-side GTM behind a Google Tag Gateway setup, you will have felt the quiet pain of a preview window that refuses to light up. The hits are going through, the data looks fine, and yet Preview Mode sits there in silence. In a previous post we discussed GTG and sGTM working together and the topic of preview mode was mentioned in passing. This time, we’ll unpick what, how, why, and what to do about it when it goes out of true. Client side vs

The GDPR was introduced on May of 2018. Since then, in the UK, the ICO has been responsible for enforcing it. For years now there has been a regulation in place stating how to collect, withdraw, and document data in regards to user consent. Google Consent Mode was launched in 2020, with v2 available from 2023. To this day though, a lot of businesses still risk non-compliance with the GDPR, and a lot have either not yet implemented Google Consent Mode, or have not done it to

Last week we attended the Google Analytics H1 roadmap webinar and came away with a clear picture of where things are heading. We cannot share the specifics (NDA firmly in place) but we can tell you what actually matters for your planning. Use this to steer your digital marketing roadmap for the rest of the year. Expect serious investment in data strength Data strength is a measure of how well your data meets the bar Google AI needs to genuinely maximise your ROI. It is not a

The Attribution Gap What happens when your bookings are online but your revenue is not There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from running a business that is clearly growing, spending confidently on Google Ads, and still not being able to answer the question: is this working? We sat in that boardroom. We saw the spreadsheets. We watched a marketing director present a cost-per-click that looks healthy next to a conversion rate that means absolutely nothing, becau

When I started Duga Digital 5 years ago (3rd February 2021) it was the middle of the pandemic. We'd just been locked down, again. It was a stressful, uncertain and volatile time. In 2019 I'd take 94 flights working for a global travel company. In early 2020, the world locked down with no real understanding of where things were going to land. In September 2020 I started a new role, another corporate job, this time in insurance. 5 years on and things have been up and down and

What we did, what we learned, and what it means for our clients and partners. Summary February marked a significant step forward for Duga Digital. We launched as a part of Google's Data Strength Programme, spoke at two international conferences, progressed several enterprise-level client conversations, and committed to formalising our key agency partnerships. This briefing covers what happened, what we learned, and where we're heading. Google Data Strength Programme: Live Dug

Value, Coaching, and the AI Tsunami By Day Five, something had shifted. The technical debates were still there. The AI questions hadn’t gone away. But the tone moved from “what is happening?” to: Who are you going to be in this new world? Pricing. Positioning. Coaching. Survival. The final day wasn’t about tools. It was about leverage. Who Wants to Bill a Million? Robert Petkovic – Pricing as Strategy Robert’s talk was less about billing a million and more about becoming the

AI Isn’t the Shortcut. It’s the Amplifier. By Day Four, something interesting happened. The tone shifted from “what is AI doing to us?” to “what are we actually doing with it?” The hype had cooled. The pattern had emerged. AI is not replacing analytics. It is exposing weak analytics. Day Four was about that exposure. Inconceivable Questions Aren’t the Problem Krista Seiden – From Inconceivable to Intentional Krista opened with a familiar tension: clients are asking questions

KPIs, Consent, Complexity and the Humans Left Standing If Day One was existential and Day Two was operational, Day Three was foundational. It forced a deeper question: Are we actually clear on what we’re trying to achieve before we optimise anything? From KPIs to tool selection, anomaly detection to AI browsers, consent automation to mindfulness the third day felt less like a technical summit and more like a systems audit of our industry. Here’s how it unfolded. Start With t

Efficiency, Intent, and the Limits of Cleverness If Day One was about existential questions – AI, agency scale, purpose and trust – Day Two was about application . How money actually gets spent. How decisions really get made. Where theory breaks once it meets humans, platforms and incentives. Across MMM, solo consulting, intent, server-side tagging, experimentation and AI agents, a consistent thread emerged: optimisation without judgment is just automation of past mistakes .

From Castle Views to Cognitive Work: What Really Matters Now Day One of Superweek 2026 opened with literal perspective. Morning views from Visegrád Castle over the Danube set the tone: this was always going to be a day about zooming out, questioning assumptions, and getting honest about where digital analytics is actually heading – not where vendor decks say it is. Across agencies, brands, platforms and tool builders, a few themes kept surfacing: size versus speed, confidenc

We found the Google Tag Gateway setup using Cloudflare to be a straightforward process. /scripts Cool. So, now we serve Google scripts from first party, same origin, same site, etc etc. /dugadataftwbbq is our "/scripts" path. We choose mild obfuscation when it comes to paths and subdomains for analytics. What about the /metrics path for data collection? /metrics We have sst.dugadigital.com for www.dugadigital.com hosted on Addingwell so we could easily spin up a new conta

I have been looking forward to writing this. Not out of routine or necessity, but because it feels like the right moment to pause and take stock. There is a point each year where the pace drops just enough for me to feel the weight of what has happened. That point has arrived. So I invite you to grab a coffee (or something stronger as you might need it), sit by a fire, late evening, early morning, whichever you prefer, when the din of deadlines has finally settled. A long

A summary of what to expect in this post about our experience with the Didomi CMP: Clean Data, Clear Conscience: Why Our New CMP is a Commercial Game-Changer Stop Leaking Data: Didomi: The Shopify Integration That Actually Works The ROI of Trust: How a Spectacular CMP Boosted Our Tech Credibility How to Master the Privacy Paradox: Balancing UX with Ironclad Consent There's more than just a Banner: How Didomi supported Duga to deliver a working CMP on Shopify Pros: Technically

In my last post , I shared some observations about the latency of our raw GA4 data landing in BigQuery. That sparked a wave of thoughtful follow-up questions. Thanks to everyone who reached out with insights and curiosities. Architecture All of the datasets we’re analysing come from a single site: DugaDigital.com. The site is dual-tracked with two server-side streams: One for GA4 360 One for GA4 Standard Which brings us to the core question: Are these two datasets actually co

Building a real-time tracker for GA4 data delivery times I have a low tolerance for the misuse of instant messages. You know the type. The single "Hi" in a chat, followed by an agonising silence. Or worse, the classic late-Friday manager message: "We need to talk." That one sends a whole weekend's worth of anxiety spiralling, even if the "talk" is just to offer praise. But when messaging systems are used well, they're brilliant. At Duga Digital, we love good, timely, automate

This article will present two ways of filtering your data in GA. If you want to keep your production data nice and clean, you want to be...