Here’s a hacky #GTMTips tip for you. Have you ever had a Google Tag Manager container, where you’ve been updating your Google Analytics tags over the years? And perhaps these tags (and, today, Google Analytics Settings variables) have been updated with an ever-expanding list of Custom Dimensions? And perhaps this list of Custom Dimensions is sorted willy-nilly, because once you have 50+ rows, it just doesn’t seem like a fun thing to do to go over each row and update them so that they are sorted by Custom Dimension index?

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Maybe you knew this, maybe you didn’t, but requests sent from your website (or app) to Google Analytics have a maximum size. Or, more specifically, the payload size (meaning the actual content body of the request) has a maximum. This maximum size of the payload is 8192 bytes. This means, basically, that the entire parameter string sent to Google Analytics servers can be no longer than 8192 characters in length. The thing is, if the payload exceeds this, Google Analytics simply drops the hit.

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When using the All Elements trigger in Google Tag Manager, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it captures all clicks on the page. It’s also brutally accurate - it captures clicks on the exact element that was below the mouse button when a click happened. This means that when working with the All Elements trigger, you need to be more careful when identifying the correct element you actually want to track clicks on.

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A while ago, I published a #GTMTips article, where I showed how you can add HTML elements to the page programmatically using Google Tag Manager. This is relevant because GTM’s validators prevent you from adding custom parameters to HTML elements that are injected directly via the Custom HTML tag. To circumvent this validation, you need to create the element programmatically, before appending it to the document. A while ago, Matteo Gamba asked me a question related to the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin.

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Last updated 13 March 2024: Clarified that you can add a trigger like Initialization – All Pages as a Custom Evaluation to give the Zone full access to page state. Google Tag Manager supports loading multiple containers on the same page. It’s useful if you have multiple companies or organizations working on the same site, but for one reason or another (e.g. governance) you want to restrict access to your main container.

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When you use the dataLayer.push() command on a page with a Google Tag Manager container, you pass information to GTM’s internal data model and potentially fire tags (if the push() contained an event key). You can also add the eventCallback key to these pushes. The value of this key should be a function, and this function is then executed once the container finishes processing any tags that might have fired on that dataLayer.

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Last updated 9 March 2018 with some new tips. The Scroll Depth trigger in Google Tag Manager has a lot going for it. Tracking how far users scroll down a given page has long since been recognized as an important cog in the engagement tracking machine, and there have been really great solutions for implementing scroll depth tracking for web analytics over the years. With Google Tag Manager’s native Scroll Depth trigger, it’s tempting to think we now have a be-all end-all solution that covers all the bases.

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