It’s not news now, but for those who’re always striving to achieve continuous improvement in web analytics could do worse than reading up on the W3C’s document of a specification for a web analytics Data Layer.
Customer Experience Digital Data Layer 1.0 by W3C December 2013
Community Group Final Report
http://www.w3.org/2013/12/ceddl-201312.pdf
I found out about the concept of a so-called data layer for web analytics early in 2013. I’m sure I was late to that party, but certainly there’s many others who’ve never even made it to the party (but there’s still time). Data Layer is one of the best things to happen for web analytics implementations in my opinion. I first read about them in an article from Justin Cutroni in relation to usage of data elements by Google Tag Manager, but, GTM has no corner on the data layer market though… any web analytics tool can work with a data layer, thanks to Javascript and particularly, jQuery (my new best friend since ’13).
Pedro Monjo also has a good post about data layer usage at his blog.