Our 5 Favorite Simo Ahava Posts

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We recently got some love from Simo Ahava for our contributions to conversations around Google Tag Manager. We're all big fans of Simo at Analytics Pros. He's a prolific member of the analytics community and makes significant contributions to our industry via his blog and myriad speaking engagements. He's smart, humble, and truly an educator. I asked our team of digital analysts to share their favorite Simo posts—blogs or tools they've found most inspiring or influential.

1. Simple RegEx Table For Google Tag Manager

"It was my first day at AnalyticsPros. Our founder had sent out an email looking for a solution that would handle RegEx pattern matching in the form of a GTM Lookup Table. The team bounced around a few ideas while I quickly ran a search on Simo's blog and found this solution. I pointed this out on the thread and the conversation immediately switched to, 'How great is Simo?' "'So great,' was the ultimate consensus. Thanks, Simo, for doing what you do!" —Pat Grady, Digital Analytics Team Lead

2. About Simo Ahava

At any event, the more you know about Simo Ahava, the smarter you will sound. Knowing about his strange fascination with the San Antonio Spurs, how he has time for playing a ukulele, or where he gets his  muscular build from can put you on top of any social interaction. —Charles Farina, Manager of Digital Analytics

3. GTM Tools

"Is it cheating to use a tool he developed? Simo created   GTMTools.com and it's been amazingly helpful in replicating GTM setups in new containers. The clone container function allows me to copy tags, triggers, and/or variables without having to export and import the whole container. Before the tool, to get around importing a whole container, I would need to open two browsers windows and manually copy the tags by recreating them one at a time. GTMTools.com has saved me many hours." —Rick Reinard, Digital Analytics Team Lead

4. Universal Analytics: Fire Script Just Once Per Session

"One of the first challenges I ever had with GTM was for a client with a very messy order confirmation page. Every time the page loaded it would fire multiple events that would trigger conversion and ecommerce goals. At the time, I knew very little JavaScript and I was working through an approach by hacking together code found on Stack Overflow. When I came across this post I was able to validate my solution! This also introduced me to Simo's blog. Since then, I regularly use his posts as a reference or for validation. 'If Simo wrote it, it must be good!,' is often what I hear from those I work with." —Justin Goodman, Digital Analytics Team Lead

5. Track Content With Enhanced Ecommerce

"This is a great article that demonstrates how you can think outside of the box when working with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. It is a wonderful example of repurposing a Google Analytics feature into something that was never intended."
—Luka Cempre, Data Scientist