Ever so often I come across a Google Tag Manager setup where GTM’s own auto-event listeners don’t perform the task they were supposed to. Listener problems seem to be a hot topic in Google+ and the Product Forums as well. There may be many reasons why your listeners don’t work, but a very common trend is that you have conflicting JavaScript libraries or scripts running on your page. Let’s explore how listeners work before tackling the problem.

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I’ve written a new Variable Guide for Google Tag Manager, which covers the new GTM UI. This guide is for the old UI. You might be vaguely familiar with macros if you’ve ever used a computer. Basically, whenever you perform a complicated task with a simple gesture, or reuse complex code with a simple input mechanism, you’re using macros. Think keyboard shortcuts. In Google Tag Manager, this is the essence of macros.

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Having just come hot of the press with my latest article on GTM and Content Grouping which, to my delight, Bounteous had written an amazing tutorial on earlier, Brian Kuhn and the amazing Google Tag Manager development team came out with another incredible new feature: The Lookup Table Macro. In software engineering, a lookup table is an array which takes away a layer of complexity in runtime computation, and replaces it with a simple value assignment based on array indexing.

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Content Grouping is a nice new feature from the good folks at Google Analytics. Basically, it allows you to group your content according to a logical structure. You can create up to five Content Groupings, and you can have as many Content Groups within these groupings as you like. The difference between a Content Grouping and Content Group is hierarchy. The second is a member of the first. Read Justin Cutroni’s post on Content Groupings to get you started.

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There is a new version of this post for GTM V2 here. While going over my previous post about using weather conditions to segment data in Google Analytics, I started thinking about performance issues. Since I’m using a visit-scope custom dimension, it seems futile to have it send the weather details with every single page load. The odds of the weather changing drastically during one visit are slim (unless you live in the UK), and I have yet to come up with a good reason to change my on-site behavior because the weather changed from a drizzle to a downpour.

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(Last updated June 2014) Google Analytics provides us with a nifty way of tracking social interactions. With a simple plugin, you can track how many +1s and Likes your pages accumulate. This guide shows you how to activate social interaction tagging with Google Tag Manager and Universal Analytics. The instructions are for Facebook Likes, Google+ +1s (now deprecated since Google Analytics tracks +1s automatically), Twitter Tweets and Pinterest Pins. Note that if you use a third-party API (e.

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There is a new version of this post for GTM V2 here. The Google Analytics Summit came and went, and thanks to the Live Stream, everyone could participate. We were treated to a rapid-fire selection of Google Analytics’ new features, and this post sheds light on one of these in particular: automated event tracking in Google Tag Manager. Auto-event tracking introduces a nice feature, which does what tag managers ought to do: it provides functionality without HTML template editing.

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