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To prevent a Tag from firing in Google Tag Manager, you can: Delete the Tag Remove all Triggers from the Tag Add an Exception Trigger to the Tag The third option is usually the best if the blocking is just temporary. Exceptions are what used to be called blocking rules in the first version of GTM. To add them is easy enough. In the Fire On step of Tag creation, you can click Create Exceptions, and choose the Trigger that will block this Tag from firing.

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In JavaScript, if you want to access an Array member, you use square bracket notation to retrieve the value stored at a specific index. Indices are numbered in order, with the first index always being at location zero (0). This means that to get the first value stored in Array simo, you’d use something like: var firstValue = simo[0]; In Google Tag Manager, you can push Arrays into the Data Layer.

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Maintaining the list of Referral Exclusions in Google Analytics admin is a pain. Especially if you have a webstore, the number of referral sources you need to exclude to avoid sessions being split can grow really fast. Also, it’s not like the list is has the most intuitive UI. Instead of a handy text area where you could just copy-paste stuff, you’re left with a horrible line-by-line list, and there’s no way of copying lists across properties or anything useful like that.

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Here’s a tip that’s especially important to anyone working with a single-page application. Google Tag Manager persists items in its data model until you either manually delete the variable and/or its value from the data model, or until the user browses away from the page. There’s nothing as annoying as the example in the image below, where a value that was set for an earlier Tag is resent with a new Tag, even though the purpose was to leave it out.

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PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is something we need to actively combat against when using Google Analytics, as the platform explicitly forbids sending PII to Google Analytics properties in any size, form, or shape. One of the most common ways of accidentally passing PII to a property is via query parameters. Many email platforms out there, for example, see no problem in including the user’s email address in the query string, especially when the user follows a link in a newsletter.

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Are you (even marginally) interested in one of the most powerful tag management systems out there? Do you want to refresh your memory on how JavaScript works in the web? Do you want to get the most out of Google Tag Manager as the go-to system for all marketing and measurement tagging on your websites? Take the Google Tag Manager Fundamentals Course at the Analytics Academy, then! And take it even if you have no idea what the tool is.

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This is a very simple tip, but judging by the number of queries on the Product Forums, it should prove helpful. Blogger is a free blogging service by Google. Like WordPress, they allow you to run hosted blogs on the blogger.com domain, and they also allow you to modify the HTML source. This, of course, means that you can add the Google Tag Manager code to the HTML template, if you wish (and why wouldn’t you!

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Simo Ahava

Husband | Father | Analytics developer
simo (at) simoahava.com

Senior Data Advocate at Reaktor

Finland