analytics-tracking

Trigger phrases

Phrases that activate this skill when typed to Claude Code:

• set up tracking
• GA4 implementation
• tracking plan
• are my events firing
• track conversions

What it does

analytics-tracking is a Claude Code skill from Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. It turns Claude into a measurement engineer who builds tracking plans backwards from the decisions you’ll make — not from a wishlist of events. The skill activates when you mention “set up tracking”, “GA4”, “GTM”, or “track conversions”, and walks through tracking-plan design, naming conventions, GA4 event configuration, GTM data layer, and UTM strategy.

The output of a session is a tracking plan document: event names, properties, triggers, custom dimensions, and conversions, plus a GA4/GTM implementation snippet for each event and a UTM-naming spreadsheet template.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• You’re setting up GA4 from scratch and don’t want to inherit twelve years of bad event names
• An audit found duplicate events, missing conversions, or PII leaking through properties
• Marketing keeps asking “did that work?” and nobody can answer

When not to reach for it:

• You need attribution modeling specifically — that’s a separate analytical question
• You’re debugging a single broken pixel; this is structural, not surgical

Install

The skill is distributed via Corey Haines’s marketing-skills repo. Install via the repo’s recommended path — copy the analytics-tracking SKILL.md into your project’s .claude/skills/analytics-tracking/ directory, or use the repo’s plugin install if you’ve set it up.

Once installed, the skill activates on the trigger phrases above. The first time it runs, it will check for .agents/product-marketing-context.md (or .claude/product-marketing-context.md) — populating that file with your product context first dramatically improves output quality across all of Haines’s marketing skills.

What a session looks like

A typical session has three phases:

1. Decisions before events. Claude won’t list events until you’ve named the decisions the data must inform. “Should we keep running this campaign?” → conversion event. “Where do users drop off?” → funnel events.
2. Naming + structure. Object-action naming (signup_completed, form_submitted, cta_clicked), property conventions, and a tracking plan table that becomes your source of truth.
3. Implementation + validation. GA4 and GTM snippets for each event, a debug checklist (DebugView, Tag Assistant), and a privacy review pass to keep PII out of properties.

The discipline that makes it work: every event has to map to a decision someone will make. The skill aggressively cuts vanity events that nobody will ever query.

Receipts

Honest reporting on what analytics-tracking produces and where it has limits:

Where it works well:

• Catches naming chaos before it ossifies — renaming events later is painful
• The decisions-first framing prevents the 80-event taxonomy that nobody understands
• The PII pass surfaces email-in-properties before privacy review does

Where it backfires:

• It assumes you’re using GA4/GTM-flavored stacks; on Mixpanel-only or Segment-routed setups some patterns need translation
• The tracking plan is only as good as the implementation review — the skill produces the plan, your dev team has to ship it

Pattern that works: run it before you migrate from UA to GA4, not after. Building the tracking plan first makes the migration mechanical instead of forensic.

Source and attribution

Originally written by Corey Haines. The canonical SKILL.md and any supporting files live in the analytics-tracking folder of his marketing-skills repository.

License: MIT. You can install, adapt, and redistribute the skill, with attribution preserved.

This page documents the skill from a practitioner’s perspective. For the formal spec and any updates, defer to the source repo.