Digital eBooks Spreading Disinfo on Tech Platforms

There’s a long history of eBooks spreading disinformation online, however, more recently digital books can be created in minutes and spread to all your social media followers. The books look legitmate, have the authority of a real book, however, they’re simply a PDF document. The books are self published and there’s nothing really special about them compared to a paperback. Today we take a look at SeditionBooks, one of the original political focused disinfo ebook libraries.

Sedition Books is an anarchist infoshop located in Houston, Texas. Anarchism is a social movement which seeks to create a classless, stateless society. It is opposed to all forms of oppression and coercion, and therefore aims to abolish not only capitalism and the state, but all oppressive social institutions such as patriarchy, white supremacy, and heterosexism.

Anarchists believe in a society based on voluntary cooperation; worker self-management; and grassroots, community-based organizations. This is not only an ideal, but imminently possible.

Infoshops are anarchist bookstores and social centers which can play a number of roles in grassroots organizing. At Sedition Books, our primary goals are to distribute literature and information about anarchist and related ideas and struggles; and to provide a space for people interested in organizing against oppression to come together.

In keeping with anarchist principles, we’re collectively organized and seek to make all decisions as a group of equals. In order to ensure that all people can have safe, equal access to the ideas and services we offer, we have a zero-tolerance policy against sexual harassment and physical/verbal abuse.

We have a community lending library; meeting space; zines, pamphlets, and lots of books for sale; free literature; and public computers with free internet access.

SeditionBooks eventually opened a storefront library

We are collectively operated & volunteer staffed. We need your help! if you would like to volunteer or join the collective, please contact us.

Joining the collective means you have equal ownership, and equal say in all decisions dealing with the infoshop. All decisions are made by consensus.

Why an “anarchist” bookstore? Anarchism is the revolutionary movement for a non-hierarchical society; tendencies within the anarchist movement range from seeking to establish libertarian communism all the way to advocating post-civilization ways of life (see “About Sedition Books” above).

We seek to distribute information on many alternatives to capitalism, the state, and all other forms of oppression; as well as radical analysis, theory and art.

The infoshop is here for groups or individuals to use for events and meetings – a venue for any kind of local music and art, for raising awareness, skill sharing, political study and organizing for action.

Alexander Hatala – An Intro With Google Tag Manager 2022

Updated 11/22/22.

Alexander Hatala is an American entrepreneur and is the co-founder of Jacksonville, Florida based company “Custom Design Partners”, a digital firm specializing in performance marketing. Alexander has been in the digital industry for 15 years and currently specializes in consumer behavior, advanced tracking, heatmapping and user analytics. Alexander Hatala graduated from Riverside Military Academy and is currently a digital consultant and tech writer on numerous publisher outlets.

Alexander Hatala (born Jan. 23, 1993) writes about, other than tech, OSINT, digital psychology, and political digital. After graduating Riverside Military Academy, Alexander moved to Jacksonville, Florida and helped start Custom Design Partners in 2016. Alexander currently has a baby girl and lives with his partner in the Jacksonville area.

Alexander reaches from his real-world experience with his enterprise clients to create case studies and insights using real-world data and strategies. You can take a look at several of his case studies at his official blog platform below. When he’s not focused on the digital landscape, he’s probably landscaping his yard, instead.

You can reach out to Alexander at his official website AlexHatala.com.

Google Tag Manager Intro

Looking for an easy way to install a tracking code on your website? Google Tag Manager is what you need! Surely you have ever heard of pixels or remarketing tags on platforms, such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, Google Ads, LinkedIn, etc.

Well, the aforementioned are known as tags or tracking codes that allow you to measure the performance of your paid advertising campaigns and analyze your metrics or KPIs, as well as optimize the SEO of your website.

However, managing these tags can be tricky, as you have to test your tags one by one and constantly update them to get optimal performance from your website. Fortunately, there is a solution that simplifies this process and it is called Google Tag Manager, a free tool that, as soon as you know it, you will not be able to live without it.

In this post I’ll show you what Google Tag Manager is and what the Google Tag Manager is used for. In addition, we will explain how to configure Google Tag Manager and how to use it in simple steps.

Get your magnifying glass ready and join us to explore more about Google Tag Manager!

What is Google Tag Manager?


Google Tag Manager is a free tag management tool that allows you to manage your tags or pixels without editing the JavaScript or HTML code and in one place. Plus, you can quickly add and update your own tags for conversion tracking, website analytics, and remarketing, collect important data, and more. Simply put, you can handle your website tagging in minutes.

As the official Google page explains, in just one hour you can check if a tag is correct and implement it. Also, Google Tag Manager works perfectly not only with Google tags, but also with third-party applications, so you can modify any tag at any time to save time and get the desired results.

What you may not know is that when tag managers were first launched on the market they were hardly accessible tools. However, some time later, the largest technology giant in the world created Google Tag Manager, a free and easy-to-use product that helps you monitor your marketing strategies. And the best? At no extra cost!

Imagine Google Tag Manager as a panel specially designed to measure your web analytics through a friendly, reliable and dynamic interface, without having to depend on a web development provider to change the code of each tag and, at the same time, free your IT team to focus on more important projects, such as a new shopping cart design.

Without a tag manager like Google Tag Manager, your IT team developers will need to manually add tags to your website and set unique rules for each one. Once this is done, it will be necessary to monitor activity frequently, troubleshoot problems (if any have been detected), discard the expired code when a new one is added, etc.

As you already know, most websites need multiple tags to track different user behaviors, such as form submissions, clicks in remarketing campaigns or online advertising ads, among others. The more tags your website has, the more difficult it will be to manage. Ugh, this is time consuming and can be expensive!

However, Google Tag Manager streamlines the entire process, minimizes the number of tags you need to implement on your website and allows you to store all the code snippets in a single space. In this way, you keep all your tracking data neat and organized. Also, you don’t have to be a developer to make code changes or implementations.

 

Part 1 of 5.

Written by Alexander Hatala, Entruepenuer co-founder and Custom Design Partners.

 

Facebook Ads Combo With Google Data Studio

There are some questions that marketing teams frequently ask:

  • What does our customer acquisition cost?
  • What is the performance of our paid advertising?
  • How much budget are we spending on ads and how many conversions do we get?
  • Finding answers to these questions is essential, but answering them is difficult. Most marketing blog posts talk about its relevance, but few talk about how you can do it automatically.

One of the main challenges is that, to answer these questions, we must bring together several data sources.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to combine your Google Ads and Facebook Ads data to understand the overall performance of your digital ads.

You will understand how data combination and Google Data Studio work so that you can replicate them with each data source. We will also make some clarifications on the preparation of the data.

Connect Facebook Ads to Google Data Studio

If you haven’t used it yet, we have a Facebook Ads connector for Google Data Studio.

We also have a complete guide to reporting Facebook Ads with Google Data Studio. Google Data Studio has a free connector for Google Ads. You just need to go to the Google Data Studio connector gallery and connect from there.

Connect Google Ads to Google Data Studio

Set up the Google Data Studio report
The first step is to include the data sources from both Facebook Ads and Google Ads in a blank report.

In your new Google Data Studio report, simply go to ‘Resources’ and click ‘Manage added data sources.’

Close the data sources tab and let’s now create our first visualizations. I recommend that you always use tables to validate how your data looks and detect possible surprises.

Create a table for each data source where the dimension is Date and the metric is Amount Spent; in Google Ads it is ‘cost’ (cost) and in Facebook Ads it is ‘amount spent’ (amount spent).

We will add more metrics, such as conversions, once we test this connection.

In this case, we have spending data for each day for our Facebook Ads connector; We have only spent on Google Ads for 6 days during the chosen period.

By joining these tables, we want to combine the total spend for each day for each data source.

As such, most dates will remain the same as there is only spend from the Facebook Ads site.

But there are six days when we need to add the spending from both data sources.

For example, for July 1, your total ad spend would be $ 2,193.94 (21.82 + 2,172.12).

When we are joining two data sources, such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads, we need a common value to be able to make sure that this union makes sense.

These values or fields are keys to combine. Often times these join keys are IDs and dates.

We will tell Google Data Studio that our join is the date- If a value such as May 5, 2020 is in both data sources, the metrics that have data on that date in both data sources are subject to being combined.

Once we have a joins key, we can add the metrics and dimensions. We can customize this union type at any time.

In this case, we will only approach the respective spending metrics from both sources.