gtmtips

Google Tag Manager has a Trigger type which fires after a certain duration of time has passed on the web page: the Timer Trigger. The most common uses for the Timer Trigger seem to be either to send an event to Google Analytics after X seconds of dwell time (to kill the Bounce), or to defer a Tag from firing until some asynchronous request has completed with certainty. In the previous version of Google Tag Manager, the Timer was a separate listener Tag, which meant that you could start a timer based on a user interaction such as a click. Read More…

Quite a while ago, I wrote an article on what I considered (then) to be my favorite Google Tag Manager resources. Many of them are still very valid, but I still wanted to write a follow-up. Times have changed, and GTM is very different from what it was two years ago when I wrote the post. So in this article, I want to divert your attention to 10 blogs, 10 articles, and 10 people - all which are and/or share excellent Google Tag Manager content on a periodic basis. Read More…

Back back to the friggin’ basics. Almost two years ago, I wrote a two-parter on how to have fun with Google Tag Manager: Part 1, and Part 2. The first part had a nice exercise for tracking JavaScript Errors as Google Analytics Events, using the recently published “JavaScript Error Listener” Tag. Well, that was in GTM V1. Now we’ve been smoothly sailing with the wonderful new interface for well over a year, and it’s time to update some of these nifty tricks. Read More…

Every now and then I run into a problem which needs some creativity to find a fix. When choosing a course of action, I tend to land first on an extremely complicated solution. However, if I’m patient enough, I manage to whittle it down to something far more manageable and efficient. In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you one of these extremely simple solutions to a problem which you might normally overcomplicate. Read More…

Hello friends! Today I want to direct your attention to a dangerous setting found within the bowels of the Universal Analytics Tag template in Google Tag Manager. In fact, GTM itself highly discourages you from meddling with it: I actually agree with this warning. It should be highly discouraged, as modifying the tracker name introduces a potential hazard to your tracking plan, unless you know what you’re doing. Read More…

Google Tag Manager’s Data Layer is something I’ve touched upon in pretty much all of my articles. It’s such an integral part of what makes a tag management solution great and applicable to a host of business scenarios. I’ve also talked at length about the internal data model of Google Tag Manager, and this #GTMTips post is very much related to this rather murky concept. In this post, we’ll go over the Data Layer Variable Version selection, and I’ll try to explain just what this selector does. Read More…

In Google Analytics for iOS, there are two types of campaign measurement. There’s install campaign measurement, which lets you track the channels which brought your visitors to the App Store, where they proceeded to download your app. There’s also launch campaign tracking, which lets you attribute app launches to specific campaigns. In this tip post, we’ll tackle the latter. We’ll leverage a feature of the Google Analytics iOS SDK to build the parameters, and then push them to dataLayer so that they can be used in the Tag. Read More…

One of the less-known features of Google Tag Manager, a hidden gem if you will, is the URL Source setting in the URL Variable type. It lets you parse any URL String for its components. Tip 38: Parse URL strings with the URL Source setting The setting itself is easy to find. Just edit an existing URL Variable, or create a new one. Then, scroll down to the More Settings divider, expand it, and you’ll see the URL Source drop-down list. Read More…

For some reason, you might run into a situation where you need to add multiple Google Tag Manager containers on the same page. Usually this is because of poor governance or an inflexible organization. My recommendation is to fix things in your projects first, and only resort to multiple containers if you can’t seem to resolve your governance issues using your vocal cords (or your fists). Officially, Google Tag Manager introduced support for adding multiple containers earlier in 2015. Read More…

(UPDATE 28 Sep 2016: The official recommendation has finally caught up with the times. Now the correct placement for the JavaScript methods of the container snippet is, indeed, in <head>.) I want to address something I’ve been confused about from the very first day since I started using Google Tag Manager. Why on earth would an asynchronously loading JavaScript library be recommended to place in the beginning of <body>, when the logical place to start loading dependencies is as early as possible in the document load process? Read More…