Here’s the link to part 2 of this JavaScript guide. The thing about Google Tag Manager, or any JavaScript tag manager for that matter, is that there’s JavaScript involved. In fact, the tool itself is just a JavaScript library with some additional bells and whistles (such as a management UI). This means that to make the best of it, some knowledge of JavaScript is warranted, and that’s the point of this post.

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Let’s say you want to set up a rudimentary email alert system in your Google Tag Manager implementation. Say, for example, you want to receive an email every time an uncaught error occurs on your website. It’s not a very good use case, since a large website can spawn hundreds of uncaught exceptions in a short period of time, but let’s just pretend for now. If you know your JavaScript, you’ll know that you can’t send mail using client-side code.

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In this post, I’ll walk you through a tutorial on how to create a Google Tag Manager extension. This extension will be a new listener, whose sole job is to listen for changes in the HTML and CSS markup on the page. The reason I’m teaching you how to create a DOM listener is simple. Ever so often I come across people asking for help, but they are unable to touch on-page code.

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First of all, I’m sorry for the wacky title. Sometimes I just want to amuse myself. Nevertheless, this post is about the Google Tag Manager container snippet. There’s nothing secretive about it, but I’m betting many people have no clue what the snippet really does. That’s the revelatory part. If you’ve never wondered what the snippet does, then shame on you! Remember, you own your page template. It’s yours. Any code that you write there is your responsibility.

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When push comes to shove, I’m a pretty lazy guy. I enjoy nothing more than just to stretch my legs on a couch, pick up my iPad, and read what’s going on in the world. I skip the news, since they’re just full of depressing stories. Instead, I head over to my favorite Google+ communities to see what’s new in the blogosphere. This approach has led me to some pretty amazing individuals, whom I follow like a suckerfish.

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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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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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