GTM Tips

One of the unfortunate misunderstandings regarding the wonderful Google Tag Manager Preview mode is what it actually means when GTM reports “Tags Fired On This Event”. For many, this seems to indicate that whatever code the Tag was meant to execute also completed successfully. However, this is not the case.

Tip 19: Debugging Tag execution vs. actual requests

Let’s get the distinction straight right away:

(Updated 15 July 2015: Added a huge simplification. Jump straight to the update at the end.)

URL fragments are strings of characters that follow a hash mark (#) in the URL. Typically, they are used for anchor links, where following a link keeps you on the same page but jumps the browser to some anchored position. They’re also the tool of choice for single-page apps, where content is served dynamically without page reloads.

In Google Tag Manager, every single Tag requires a Trigger to fire. Every single Trigger requires an Event condition to activate. Sometimes, these Event conditions are obfuscated under template semantics, but you can also create a Custom Event Trigger, where you specify the value of the ’event’ key in dataLayer that fires your tag. You can read more about the relationship between GTM events and Tags in these two posts:

• #GTMtips: Rules In A Nutshell

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Due to a recent change in the UI (see entry for February 12, 2015 in the release notes), the large and ever-expanding group of fields you could set for your Universal Analytics tags has been mostly removed. Instead, the often obscure Fields to Set selection has been promoted to the top of More Settings, and you control most of the Universal Analytics fields through this selector.

In this #GTMtips, we’ll take a quick look at what’s changed, how it’s changed, and how to work with this new, slimmed-down tag template.

In this #GTMtips post, we’ll go over a simple method for tracking file downloads in Google Tag Manager, specifically the new, V2 interface. Also, “tracking file downloads” means sending Events to Google Analytics, so this is a GA for GTM guide as well.

Tip 15: Set up file download tracking in GTM

Since we’re using Google Analytics as the tracking platform, we’ll need the following ingredients to make this setup work:

NOTE 30 Oct 2019: I’ve published a new article on outbound link tracking in Google Tag Manager, which makes the whole process much, MUCH simpler. I strongly recommend you read that article instead.

Tracking outbound links is important for many. Identifying the exit paths is almost as important as tracking entrances. In this simple #GTMtips post, I’ll show you how to track outbound links with a simple Trigger + Auto-Event Variable combination in the new Google Tag Manager interface.

With Google Tag Manager, there are a million different ways to make your tagging setup leaner and more flexible. The reason this should be a priority is because the UI isn’t perfect. The more tags you have, the more difficult it becomes to manage your assets.

In this #GTMtips post, I show you one of my favorite ways to put your container on a diet.

Tip 13: How to create a Generic Event Tag

I’ve seen a lot of containers that suffer from the same problem. They have many Event tags which only differ by the Event that triggers them and/or by the tag fields of Event Category / Action / Label / Value. There’s an easy way to reduce redundancy here. It’s the Generic Event Tag (you guessed it!).

You’ve probably heard of the Konami Code. It’s a cheat code in many Konami games, where the cheat is executed with a sequence of key presses on the keyboard. Since then, it’s become one of the staples of video game folk lore, and many websites, games, and applications have their own easter eggs activated with the Konami code.

The sequence of keys is:

up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A

In this tip, we’ll take a look at how to leverage a custom first-party cookie to prevent repeat hits of any kind. This is most useful for transactions, since a common problem with Google Analytics (traditional) eCommerce tracking is that a transaction hit is sent again upon subsequent entries to the receipt page, for example using the Back button of the browser. In some cases, and this is not a good practice, a receipt e-mail is sent to the user with a link back to the receipt page, where the transaction is sent over and over again upon entry.

I’ve written about this before here and here, but this issue remains probably the biggest problem users have when implementing Google Tag Manager.

Tip 10: Resolve conflicts with GTM’s listeners

The tip title is actually wrong. You’re not fixing Google Tag Manager listeners. Rather, you’re resolving conflicts that other scripts on your page might introduce.

GTM’s event listening is based on something called event delegation. Event delegation makes use of the document object model (DOM) and its tree-like hierarchy.