A very recent addition to Google Tag Manager is the Format Value option in all of GTM’s variables. With Format Value, you can modify the output of the variable with a number of pre-defined transformations. This is extremely handy, because you no longer need to create Custom JavaScript variables whose sole purpose of existence it to change the output of other variables to lowercase, or to change undefined values to fallback strings (e.

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Ever since the Lookup Table variable was introduced in Google Tag Manager, users have been craving for more. The Lookup Table does exactly what it promises: lookups. These are exact match operations, which are extremely inexpensive to perform, because they can only have a binary result: either the match exists in the data store being queried or it doesn’t. This performance stays constant even if the data store being queried increases in size.

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Let’s face it - most of us use Google Tag Manager for one main purpose: to deploy and configure Google Analytics tracking on a website. I’d wager that once you start using GTM, you won’t be implementing Universal Analytics the old-fashioned way, with on-page code, any more. But running Universal Analytics tags through GTM isn’t yet a perfect workflow. We’re still missing things like proper plugin support and the option to properly differentiate between the tracker and the hit - both of which are easy to do with an on-page implementation.

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When our good friends in the Google Tag Manager developer team first introduced the Lookup Table Macro, we were excited. For many of us, it soon became the weapon of choice especially when used as a management and optimization tool for the container itself. However, the macro wasn’t considered perfect. In fact, the most frequently heard request had to do with the core functionality of the feature itself: the macro should support operations, that is, predicate logic.

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