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Since the introduction of custom templates in May 2019, the community (myself included) has been anxiously waiting for some official solution for curating and distributing templates created by the community. Now, finally, we have it. It’s called the Community Template Gallery! Read Google’s announcement in this blog post. I’m not going to go over the basics in this article, since Google’s own documentation stands fine on its own feet.

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Sometimes, in Google Tag Manager’s Debug mode, you’ll see tags appear with the status Still Running, and you’ll (eventually) notice that these tags are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. When you see this message on a tag, it technically means this: The tag failed to signal Google Tag Manager that it is “done”. The technical explanation is, naturally, too simple to be useful. In this article, I’ll explore what “done” means, and how especially Google Analytics tags manifest this behavior.

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I’ve enjoyed working with custom templates for Google Tag Manager. A lot. So much so that whenever the need to add some custom code to a container emerges, my first thought is how to turn that into a custom template. Google has been forthcoming in introducing new APIs steadily, and I think the variety of things you can do with template is improving with every new API release. In this article, I’ll show you how to use a simple tag template for distributing your users to groups, based on a random split.

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A surprisingly common question in forums and communities seems to be why the built-in Click variables show up as undefined in Google Tag Manager’s Preview mode, even if you click around the site. In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the reasons why this might happen. Tip 104: What to do when Click variables are undefined Here’s the situation: you want to create a Click trigger for your tags, but in order to do so, you’d need to see what values the built-in Click variables (e.

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A while ago, I published an article on how to build an Android application, and bundle it with Firebase. The purpose of that article, and the one you are reading now, is to slowly introduce the world of mobile app development and Firebase, given the latter is getting more and more traction as Google’s go-to analytics platform. After finishing work on the Android guide, I immediately started working on its counterpart for iOS, and that’s the one you’re reading now.

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With the release of Google Analytics: App + Web, Firebase is suddenly all the rage. The new App + Web property can combine data from your website and mobile apps, as long as the latter uses Google Analytics for Firebase, formerly known as Firebase Analytics. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the steps of creating an extremely simple Android application, and we’ll then create a Firebase project, and for good measure add Google Tag Manager to the mix.

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It’s been a while since I’ve last written a bona fide Google Tag Manager trick, so here comes. This was inspired by Bart Gibby’s question in Measure Slack. The purpose is to fetch the latest currency exchange rates from the exchangeratesapi.io service, cache them using sessionStorage, and push the results into dataLayer. From dataLayer, they can then be utilized in Custom JavaScript variables and custom variable templates to perform client-side conversions.

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Simo Ahava

Husband | Father | Analytics developer
simo (at) simoahava.com

Senior Data Advocate at Reaktor

Finland