Google Tag Manager

When custom templates were released for Google Tag Manager, I updated my workflow for working with GTM. Instead of instinctively rushing to the Custom HTML tag and the Custom JavaScript variable, I started considering whether the custom script that needed to be deployed could be transformed into a custom template first. While publishing numerous templates into the community gallery, I always spent some time over the past 12 months tinkering on an extremely complicated template translation: the Snowplow Analytics JavaScript tracker. Read More…

The shadow DOM is a way to add HTML structures to the web page so that they remain isolated from the rest of the document object model (DOM). It’s a popular concept with web components, as it allows for encapsulation of web structures so that they aren’t affected by style declarations of the parent tree, for example. However, being such a “hidden” structure, anything that happens in the shadow DOM is also hidden from Google Tag Manager’s listeners. Read More…

One of the most versatile triggers in Google Tag Manager is the Custom Event trigger. As its name indicates, you can use it to fire your tags when an event is pushed into dataLayer. This process is at the heart of GTM’s dataLayer system. And it’s not just custom events. Every single trigger type in Google Tag Manager uses the event key in a dataLayer.push(), which is why you’ll see events like gtm. Read More…

With the proliferation of gtag.js implementations, we can see that there’s a small-ish paradigm shift in how to implement Google’s stack of marketing tools. As adding gtag.js snippets to the site code becomes more and more common (to cater to things like early Optimize loading), you might be at a point where you have lots of interesting information stored in the gtag.js queue but no way to access it in your Google Tag Manager tags and variables. Read More…

I’ve covered the more pervasive issue with tags not firing in Google Tag Manager in my article on the “Still Running” status. However, there’s an additional problem you might face with Google Analytics: tags that show status Failed, and which refuse to send any data to Google Analytics. There are a couple of possible reasons for this, and we’ll explore them in this article. Note that any tag type in Google Tag Manager can signal Failed. Read More…

With so many people working from home or remotely in these turbulent times, it’s time to revisit one of my oldest articles, and discuss the options you have for excluding or segmenting internal traffic in Google Analytics. The traditional method of IP address exclusion is not necessarily the best option anymore, unless all your employees use a specific VPN to connect to the site. In this article, we’ll go through some of the tools you have at your disposal. Read More…

With the enforcement of SameSite settings in the latest versions of Google Chrome, it’s become a mad scramble to get cookies working across first-party and third-party contexts. I’ve covered this phenomenon before in my SameSite article, as well as in my guide for setting up cookieless tracking for iframes. Recently, Google Analytics updated its libraries (App+Web, gtag.js, and analytics.js) with a new setting: cookieFlags (analytics.js) or cookie_flags (App+Web and gtag.js). Read More…

With iOS and Android containers available for Google Tag Manager, it’s tempting to add GTM as an integration into an existing Firebase setup for your apps. It’s also a fine way to get acquainted with Firebase in the first place, as it has a plethora of features to make application development easier. Furthermore, with the advent of App + Web, there’s even more incentive to integrate your app with Firebase. Read More…

One of the hard-and-fast rules in Google Analytics is that once hits have been collected and processed into your data properties, those hits are untouchable. This means that if you mistakenly collect duplicate or incorrect transactions, PII traffic, or referral spam, for example, it’s extremely difficult, if not downright impossible, to purge or change this data in Google Analytics. Another staple of Google Analytics’ strict schema is that displacing hits in time is also very difficult. Read More…

Until recently, I had a feature on GTM Tools that polled the user’s Google Tag Manager container(s) for a recently published version. If one was found, a notification was sent to a Slack app, which forwarded it to a workspace and channel of the user’s choice. This was fine, except for the fact that polling the GTM and Slack APIs for dozens upon dozens of containers is a total resource hog, and the only way I can maintain GTM Tools is it doesn’t have API leaks like that. Read More…