Google Tag Manager

The release of bulk actions in the Google Tag Manager user interface was very welcome. For years, GTM users had been struggling with a somewhat crippled workflow of item-by-item management. This release is even more impressive with the most recent update to it: bulk actions with TRIGGERS. You can now select multiple tags and attach one or more triggers (or exceptions) to them. Or, conversely, you can use the feature to remove triggers (or exceptions) from tags. Read More…

Last updated 17 March 2023: Item-scoped Custom Dimensions are now available in Google Analytics 4. This is an implementation guide for Google Analytics 4. The guide is aimed at Google Tag Manager users and has been designed to complement the official documentation. A thing to keep in mind is that Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is still very new. The Google Tag Manager integration is still in its infancy, and implementation places a lot of responsibility on accurate tagging and proper dataLayer instrumentation. Read More…

Last updated 12 February 2021: Clarified how Preview is shared. Your favorite tagging platform, Google Tag Manager, now comes equipped with a completely revamped preview mode experience. Gone are the days of having to minimize the debug pane to prevent it from hogging up screen real estate on the website. Gone are the days of having to use browser extensions to see what happened in GTM on previous page loads. Read More…

Note! This is about the original version of Consent Mode. While the content is still very valid and you should read through it to understand how it works, Google has since released a “V2” update with additional consent signals. You can read about Consent Mode V2 here. . Not too long ago, Google announced a new consent mode for Google tags. It allows you to build a mechanism where Google’s tags parse, react, and respond to the consent status of your site visitors. Read More…

It’s lovely to see small, incremental, quality-of-life improvements to Google Tag Manager amid the behemothian feature releases such as custom templates in 2019 and server-side tagging in 2020. This time around, we’ll take a look at the upgraded search functionality of the Google Tag Manager user interface, which makes search an actually useful tool. In addition to this, we’ll take a look at one of the most requested features in the history of Google Tag Manager, which we finally have access to: bulk actions! Read More…

Exporting a container in Google Tag Manager can have many purposes. From backing up Google Tag Manager versions to creating and distributing repositories of useful container snapshots, the container export is one of the most useful non-tagging-related tools that the GTM user interface offers. However, one big misgiving in the feature (until now) has been that exporting just a subset of the container version or workspace has been impossible. It’s always the entire container or nothing. Read More…

A recent update to Google Tag Manager introduced container notifications. By subscribing to container notifications, your Google Tag Manager login email address can be configured to receive an email for some of the key workflows in Google Tag Manager: containers getting published, and containers being submitted for approval (Tag Manager 360 only), for example. Be sure to check out the official help center article about container notifications. In this article, I’ll walk you through the feature and share a couple of tips on how to make it even more useful! Read More…

When you create a Server container in Google Tag Manager, GTM creates an App Engine deployment in the Google Cloud Platform for you. App Engine is a managed serverless platform, which basically means it’s a (set of) virtual machine(s) running in the cloud, with some extra bells and whistles added to make managing it easier. A potentially useful thing that App Engine does is decorate all incoming HTTP requests with some HTTP headers that can be used in the app. Read More…

Since the release of Server-side tagging in Google Tag Manager, I’ve jumped at every opportunity to celebrate the tools it provides for improving end-user privacy and data security. One of the biggest benefits is obfuscation-by-default. Since all hits are passed through the server-side proxy, the default view for any third-party tool (such as Google Analytics) is that of the server in the Google Cloud rather than the browser and device with which the user was browsing the site. Read More…

Last updated 27 April 2023 with details about preventing FPID access in cookieless scenarios. With Server-side tagging, the developer community has a chance to vastly improve the data collection capabilities of Google’s analytics platforms (Universal Analytics and App+Web). The ability to build our own templates is particularly potent with a Server container. However, it’s not as if Google themselves are just sitting idly by and seeing what the community can come up with. Read More…