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Apologies for leaving you hanging. It’s now almost three weeks since I published the first part of this post, and I’m sure you’ve been holding your breath ever since.

There’s been a lot going on since the last post. First, my favorite sports team in the world, San Antonio Spurs, won their fifth NBA championship from the defending champs, Miami Heat. Next, my wife and I moved to our new house, and we’ve been remodeling ever since. It’s been hectic with work and life getting mixed up in a potpourri of saw dust and web analytics, but now it’s time to return back to the wonderful world of Google Tag Manager!

It’s time to dig into my tip library for some pretty cool things you can do with Google Tag Manager to enhance your site tagging. Some of these are macro magic through and through, some of these are best practices, and some of these are things that will make your life easier while managing a tag management solution.

I’ve split this post into two parts to make it more Hobbit and less Lord Of the Rings length-wise.

That’s right, I changed the name! Huge thanks to Paul Gailey for the inspiration.

Get the latest version of GTM Sonar here.

Just a minor update this time. I added some informative text to the pop-up, along with an error screen if something goes wrong.

Another change is that now when an element is added to debugDL, a counter on the Browser Action icon will start climbing, representing the number of objects in the array. Cool!

(Last updated June 2014: Read the latest post on the extension, GTM Sonar v1.2.)

I updated my Chrome Extension, GTM Auto-Event Listener Debugger v1.1. I released the first version a couple of days ago. The extension can be used to debug Google Tag Manager’s auto-event tracking and its compatibility with web page markup.

Download the latest version here.

I did some major changes, and here’s the rundown.

1. I transferred all debugger actions into a pop-up, which opens when you click the Browser Action. The debugger is still tab-specific, so it can have different states in different tabs. Also, The Browser Action still turns green when the debugger is enabled for current tab.

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(Last updated June 2014: Read the latest post on the extension, GTM Sonar v1.2.)

Many of the Google Tag Manager articles on this blog could be considered hacks, in that they extend the out-of-the-box features of GTM in ways that will surely not be officially supported by Google. The crux of the problem is that lots of folks are taken by surprise when GTM refuses to work properly on their site, or when they have trouble tracking key elements on the page template.

…or How My Organic Traffic Went Through The Roof.

It’s been one of the craziest 365 days in my life, and I thought it would be apt to write a bit about all the stuff that’s taken place. I haven’t really been talking about myself in my guides and other previous posts, so please indulge me, for once!

The beginning

A year ago I had just quit my job at my previous employer, Innofactor Plc. When I quit, I’d been working as a product owner for Microsoft SharePoint CMS (content management system) components, and I wasn’t really seeing any future in it. To be honest, I still don’t think “Microsoft SharePoint” and “CMS” should ever be uttered in the same sentence, but Innofactor did do some pretty cool stuff that made the relationship between the two a bit smoother.

Over the last couple of posts I’ve mainly been doing proof-of-concept (POC) tests with Google Tag Manager. The great thing about a POC is that you don’t really need to have any viable results or insight-driving technological innovations. The point is to showcase some feature of the platform on which the experiment was conducted.

In this post, I’ll take a care-free step into the world of POCs again. My goal is to do a simple split test in order to identify which variant of a landing page (or key element thereof) produces the most conversions.

Let’s say you want to set up a rudimentary email alert system in your Google Tag Manager implementation. Say, for example, you want to receive an email every time an uncaught error occurs on your website. It’s not a very good use case, since a large website can spawn hundreds of uncaught exceptions in a short period of time, but let’s just pretend for now.

If you know your JavaScript, you’ll know that you can’t send mail using client-side code. That’s a browser security thing, and I completely understand it. However, a vast majority of websites are created using a CMS which might provide some mail function or hook for you to use. And even if you don’t have a cooperative web server (or there’s no way you can persuade your developers to help), you could use any one of the online email APIs that are out there.

In this post, I’ll walk you through a tutorial on how to create a Google Tag Manager extension. This extension will be a new listener, whose sole job is to listen for changes in the HTML and CSS markup on the page.

The reason I’m teaching you how to create a DOM listener is simple. Ever so often I come across people asking for help, but they are unable to touch on-page code. Usually the problem is magnified with form handlers, since the developers might have installed some custom jQuery form manager, for instance, which simply refuses to cooperate with GTM’s form listeners. That is why you might want to fire a GTM event when a certain message pops up on the screen, for example.

If you know your Google Tag Manager, you know that GTM pushes three data layer events into the queue when any page with the container snippet is rendered. Each of these three events signals a specific stage in the page load process. Here are the events (be sure to read my guide on GTM rules to understand further what these events do):

• gtm.js - This is pushed into the data layer as soon as GTM is initialized and the container is loaded. This is also the default event for all rules without an explicit event macro rule as a condition. Basically, if you want something to happen at the earliest possible moment, you need to have {{event}} equals gtm.js as the rule

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