Last updated 20 April 2020: Clarified how lazy-loaded videos can be tracked with this trigger. Let’s cut straight to the chase. Google Tag Manager has just released the YouTube Video trigger, which gives you native support for YouTube video tracking. And it’s great! Even though we’ve been more than satisfied with the excellent tracking scripts provided by e.g. Cardinal Path and Bounteous (with a small modification from yours truly), this is a no-brainer for native support in Google Tag Manager.

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The steady increase in mobile use over the last years has introduced some new challenges for web analytics. It’s not just about mismatches in the tracking model (the concept of sessions is even more absurd for apps than it is for desktop browsing), but about something more fundamental, more basic. Think about it: if a visitor visits the website using a mobile device, there’s a significant chance of them losing internet connectivity and going unintentionally offline.

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If you open the Google Tag Manager user interface and browser your tags, triggers, and variables, you might notice that the UI now has two new features: Pagination, where only 50 results are shown per page A quick search / filter bar at the top of each list, which lets you narrow the list down to results that match your query Pagination might be a nuisance in large containers, but it was implemented to improve performance.

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Tracking what a user selects in a drop-down (or select) list/menu can be very useful. This is particularly the case when the selection immediately does something, such as initiate a download or navigate the user to another page. But even if there is no immediate action, it’s still interesting to know what selections users might be doing, if only to uncover yet another piece of the engagement puzzle. Here’s the Google Tag Manager way to do it!

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Facebook’s pixel has an attribute named content_ids (required for Dynamic Ads), which requires an Array of content IDs as its value. It’s very possible you’re running this pixel on a site which already has Enhanced Ecommerce for Universal Analytics implemented, and now you want to use the same Enhanced Ecommerce data that your developers have already made available in this Facebook pixel. Or perhaps you want to concatenate a list of strings, such as article tags (['culture', 'politics']), and send it as a comma-separated string to Google Analytics ('culture,politics').

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One of the things I’ve recommended from the get-go is to always send the Client ID to Google Analytics with your users’ hits. This is very useful for adding a level of granularity to your tracking. At first, I recommended using an Event tag to do this. Then I modified my approach a little so that you could send it with your initial Page View (thus not inflating your hit counts).

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Let’s face it - most of us use Google Tag Manager for one main purpose: to deploy and configure Google Analytics tracking on a website. I’d wager that once you start using GTM, you won’t be implementing Universal Analytics the old-fashioned way, with on-page code, any more. But running Universal Analytics tags through GTM isn’t yet a perfect workflow. We’re still missing things like proper plugin support and the option to properly differentiate between the tracker and the hit - both of which are easy to do with an on-page implementation.

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