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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Last updated 24 August 2022: The instructions in this article are no longer that useful, as you can simply use the native JavaScript Element.closest(selector) method instead of the {{Find Closest}} trick described in this article. Browser support for closest has thankfully improved a great deal since this article was originally written. Google Tag Manager provides us with a bunch of handy triggers, designed to make capturing user interactions on the website much easier.

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One of the biggest fears I have as a Google Tag Manager user is a broken release of the website (or app) on which I have deployed GTM. Far too often, lack of proper communication practices within an organization lead to a release being pushed out without thoroughly testing how this release impacts any existing tracking solutions. Luckily there are ways to mitigate this. The most significant and impactful precautions you can take are all about process:

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I recently published a #GTMTips guide called 10 Useful CSS Selectors, and it was very well received. Inspired by the feedback, here’s the next instalment. This time, we’re going over some useful JavaScript tips and tricks that you can use to make your Google Tag Manager deployment even more efficient. I’ve written a lot about JavaScript in this blog, and I intend to keep on doing so in the future. As always, if JavaScript is somewhat of a mystery to you, I strongly recommend you take the Codecademy (free) course on JS, and take a look at the other available web technology tracks while you’re there!

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Without a doubt, the possibility to leverage CSS selectors in Google Tag Manager’s trigger conditions is one of the most useful features of the platform. It gives you an amazing amount of flexibility, especially when combined with GTM’s click and form triggers. Essentially, CSS selectors let you test an HTML Element against a selector string. This check verifies that the element matches the given selector. In practice, this would mean that when you use the click or form trigger, you can check if the Click Element or Form Element built-in variables match a specific selector, allowing you to confirm that the action happened on the correct element.

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A while ago, the Google Tag Manager team published one of my favorite feature releases in the history of GTM: Workspaces. I was so thrilled by this release that I went ahead and published a guide on how to implement and leverage this new feature. Workspaces is a very comprehensive feature in Google Tag Manager. This is because it changed the entire underlying data model. We no longer work directly with a single container draft.

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