In this #GTMTips article, we’ll take a look at user permissions and access control levels that Google Tag Manager lets you set today. Doing access control right from a user interface AND user experience perspective is really difficult, and GTM is no exception. Nevertheless, there are several levels of user control that you can modify from account and container settings, and it’s useful to familiarize with these so that managing a big, sprawling account hierarchy would be just a bit easier.

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With the release of the latest Google Tag Manager API version, it’s time to release the new version of GTM Tools. Most of the changes have been done under the hood, with the entire codebase refactored for improved stability. I released the first toolset in October 2014, and quickly released an updated UI a few months later. Aside from a few bug fixes and stability improvements, the tools have remained largely unchanged since then.

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Google Tag Manager has a very nifty programmatic API that lets you do almost anything that’s also possible within the GTM UI. I’ve used the API a lot, most notably for my GTM Tools, which might be getting a new release soon, too! The API was recently updated to its second release version (V2), and in this article I want to go over the additions, removals, and changes that the new version introduced.

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To be fair, this tip isn’t just for Google Tag Manager but for regular old on-page Google Analytics as well. It’s one of those little things that’s corroding your data quality without you ever realizing it. Namely, this tip is about how to handle cross-domain tracking in situations where you are sending data to multiple Google Analytics properties on the same page. It’s a very typical scenario - you have a “local” property, which tracks only the traffic of the current site, and then a “rollup” property, where you send data from all your organization’s websites.

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I’ve always been proud to avoid the typical headline clickbait of “Ultimate guide to pigeon care”, “All you need to know about the Great Vowel Shift”, “Did you know that you’ve been smoking peyote wrong your whole life?”. I’m ready to make an exception now by adding a BIG WHOPPING NUMBER to the title. You see, the amount of knowledge one can accumulate about anything they do on a daily basis is mind-blowing.

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A couple of years ago I wrote an article on tracking interactions with the SoundCloud widget via Google Tag Manager. When a platform provides a JavaScript embed API, it’s surprisingly easy to track interactions with the player. You’ve seen this with YouTube, with SoundCloud, with JWPlayer, and now you’ll see how to do this with the Mixcloud player. If you don’t know what Mixcloud is, well it’s a hugely popular streaming service for DJs, podcasts, radio shows, and other published radio media.

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The beauty of #GTMTips, at least how I’ve envisioned them, is that they can be really simple or crazy complex. The important thing is that the idea is conveyed clearly enough. That’s why so many of these tips have originated from discussions in our Google Tag Manager Google+ community, the Product Forums, and in private email correspondence with people asking for help. Today’s tip, for example, originated from a back-and-forth with Süleyman Okan, so thank you for the inspiration!

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