#GTMTips: Introducing The GTM Templates Library

When Custom Templates were released in Google Tag Manager, many of us active in the GTM communities started doing two things: 1) creating our own custom templates, and 2) waiting patiently for Google to release a “gallery” or “library” for distributing these community contributions.

While I have full faith in the latter happening some time in the future, I thought it would be fun to create something similar to a library, and then open-sourcing it for the community to help out with or to download locally for their own purposes.

The end result can be seen at –DEPRECATED, see below–.

UPDATE 9 July 2020: Because Google now has the official community gallery, the resource described in this article has been shut down.

The open-source GitHub repository can be found here: https://github.com/sahava/GoogleTagManagerTemplates_site.

Tip 101: Introducing the GTM Templates service

First, let’s get one thing out of the way. This is a hobby project. The time and devotion put into it has been entirely dependent on what amounts of these resources have been available at any given time. Thus there are plenty of unpolished corners and places to improve, which is one of the reasons I decided to open-source the whole thing in the first place.

The library uses templates that community members have kindly uploaded to the GoogleTagManagerTemplates repository, with metadata added by me (so any mistakes are my fault, and my fault alone. Please let me know in article comments or via email to simo at simoahava.com if you want me to correct any mistake you find).

There are basic search, sort, and filter options available, but as we are starting with a relatively small inventory of templates, it’s as of yet unknown how much optimization needs to be done with these features.

By clicking a template name, you can view detailed information about the template, and you can also download the template TPL file for importing it into Google Tag Manager. You can also view the permissions tab and even leave a review of a template (using Disqus).

There are lots of features that could be added to the library, so feel free to contribute ideas as issues in the GitHub repository.

If you want to upload templates to the library, you’ll need to provide them in the original GoogleTagManagerTemplates repository, or by contacting Simo Ahava via email.

If you want to contribute to development work on the service, the best way to do so is to ping Simo Ahava in Measure Slack for an invitation to the private channel where the service design and development collaboration takes place. To collaborate, you will need access to the Google Cloud project of the service, and some other information and secret keys, too.

I am working on improving the documentation in the repository for the service, so that users can download the repository locally and run it with success. It basically requires you to create your own Google Cloud Project and configure Cloud Datastore to work with your local installation.

Thank you to all the collaborators who have worked on the service thus far (you can find a list of all contributors in GitHub).

I’ll just sign off by repeating that this is a hobby project. If Google decides to release a library or gallery for custom templates, it’s very likely that its feature set will be richer and more comprehensive than anything that our community could create or manage as a hobby project, so at that point we might just look at merging our current templates into the official library, and leaving this GTM Templates site to survive in the web as a curiosity.

Feel free to suggest new features in the comments, or let me know if you are having problems with the site or the templates contained within!