Simo Ahava's blog

Google has a myriad of ways to make the search engine results page (SERP) livelier. When you input a search query, the engine’s mission is to provide you with the most relevant information with as few clicks as possible. Often, this means that you’ll see the answer to your query directly in the SERP:

See also Dr. Pete’s excellent description of variation in the SERP (note that this post is from 2013, and not all the data types are relevant today). As you can see, there are many ways for a site to annotate data found within, and that way provide it for Google to utilize if it so chooses. There’s no guarantee that your structured data is picked up by the search engine, but that shouldn’t deter you from marking up your content anyway.

Google has a myriad of ways to make the search engine results page (SERP) livelier. When you input a search query, the engine’s mission is to provide you with the most relevant information with as few clicks as possible. Often, this means that you’ll see the answer to your query directly in the SERP:

See also Dr. Pete’s excellent description of variation in the SERP (note that this post is from 2013, and not all the data types are relevant today). As you can see, there are many ways for a site to annotate data found within, and that way provide it for Google to utilize if it so chooses. There’s no guarantee that your structured data is picked up by the search engine, but that shouldn’t deter you from marking up your content anyway.

With Google Tag Manager, there are a million different ways to make your tagging setup leaner and more flexible. The reason this should be a priority is because the UI isn’t perfect. The more tags you have, the more difficult it becomes to manage your assets.

In this #GTMtips post, I show you one of my favorite ways to put your container on a diet.

Tip 13: How to create a Generic Event Tag

I’ve seen a lot of containers that suffer from the same problem. They have many Event tags which only differ by the Event that triggers them and/or by the tag fields of Event Category / Action / Label / Value. There’s an easy way to reduce redundancy here. It’s the Generic Event Tag (you guessed it!).

You’ve probably heard of the Konami Code. It’s a cheat code in many Konami games, where the cheat is executed with a sequence of key presses on the keyboard. Since then, it’s become one of the staples of video game folk lore, and many websites, games, and applications have their own easter eggs activated with the Konami code.

The sequence of keys is:

up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A

(Updated 21 February 2019)

The current version of Google Tag Manager was released in October 2014. With the release, we saw a brand-spanking new UI, a lot of new functionalities (revamped auto-event tracking, for example), plus a new terminology to cope with. We moved away from the programming-centric concepts of Macros and Rules to the more tactile variables and triggers.

It’s difficult to rank the changes. The new Auto-Event Tracking is perhaps most impactful, but the improvements done to triggers and variables, when compared to the previous version of GTM, require attention as well.

My fingers have been tingling to write this article. Ever since I implemented Enhanced Ecommerce on my blog a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been getting such an impressive amount of useful data that it’s mind-boggling.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps I went to implement the solution, along with examples of the data I can now access through Google Analytics’ reporting interface. As you might have guessed, if you’ve read my articles before, I implemented Enhanced Ecommerce with Google Tag Manager. Note, this is not a step-by-step guide, but should rather provide inspiration for you to think out-of-the-box when it comes to Google Analytics’ features.

In this tip, we’ll take a look at how to leverage a custom first-party cookie to prevent repeat hits of any kind. This is most useful for transactions, since a common problem with Google Analytics (traditional) eCommerce tracking is that a transaction hit is sent again upon subsequent entries to the receipt page, for example using the Back button of the browser. In some cases, and this is not a good practice, a receipt e-mail is sent to the user with a link back to the receipt page, where the transaction is sent over and over again upon entry.

Updated 27 March 2019

In the new version of Google Tag Manager, one of the most visible and profound changes to the previous version is how tags are fired (and blocked). First of all, there’s the obvious terminological distinction: we talk about triggers now, not rules. Second, triggers have become an integral part of the tag creation workflow, and as such have far more significance in the user interface than before.

The following text is a standalone article. It’s not an update to the guide I wrote for the previous GTM version: Google Tag Manager: Playing By The Rules, and many of the concepts covered therein are still valid.

One of the recurring problems in migrating to Google Tag Manager is how to make the transition as smooth as possible. Usually it requires that we agree with the developers on a time when the old code is removed, and at that moment we need to make sure the GTM tags point to the right UA code. This is, of course, only one use case for migrations, as some people do the entire migration in a staging environment, and some just don’t care if they lose a little bit of data along the way.

When our good friends in the Google Tag Manager developer team first introduced the Lookup Table Macro, we were excited. For many of us, it soon became the weapon of choice especially when used as a management and optimization tool for the container itself.

However, the macro wasn’t considered perfect. In fact, the most frequently heard request had to do with the core functionality of the feature itself: the macro should support operations, that is, predicate logic. It’s not enough to just have equal match lookups; people wanted support for operations such as “is x larger than y” or “does y contain x”.

I’ve written about this before here and here, but this issue remains probably the biggest problem users have when implementing Google Tag Manager.

Tip 10: Resolve conflicts with GTM’s listeners

The tip title is actually wrong. You’re not fixing Google Tag Manager listeners. Rather, you’re resolving conflicts that other scripts on your page might introduce.

GTM’s event listening is based on something called event delegation. Event delegation makes use of the document object model (DOM) and its tree-like hierarchy.