Simo Ahava's blog

Every now and then I run into a problem which needs some creativity to find a fix. When choosing a course of action, I tend to land first on an extremely complicated solution. However, if I’m patient enough, I manage to whittle it down to something far more manageable and efficient.

In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you one of these extremely simple solutions to a problem which you might normally overcomplicate. The solution is a very well hidden feature of Google Tag Manager, buried deep in the bowels of the google_tag_manager interface.

Every now and then I run into a problem which needs some creativity to find a fix. When choosing a course of action, I tend to land first on an extremely complicated solution. However, if I’m patient enough, I manage to whittle it down to something far more manageable and efficient.

In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you one of these extremely simple solutions to a problem which you might normally overcomplicate. The solution is a very well hidden feature of Google Tag Manager, buried deep in the bowels of the google_tag_manager interface.

In this article, I’m going to tackle one of the most frequently asked questions out there:

Can you run Google Analytics using the snippet AND using a Google Tag Manager Tag on the same page?

There are many facets to this query, so I’ll try to tackle as many of them as I possibly can.

First, a terminology rant. You hear lots of talk about “on-page” and “inline” Google Analytics tracking, as that’s what’s used to describe the non-GTM way of tracking Google Analytics. Well, all the power to you, but I think they’re just adding to the confusion. GTM is just as “on-page” and “inline” as GA’s own snippet, as both are based on injecting an asynchronous HTTP request that downloads the respective library.

Hello friends! Today I want to direct your attention to a dangerous setting found within the bowels of the Universal Analytics Tag template in Google Tag Manager. In fact, GTM itself highly discourages you from meddling with it:

I actually agree with this warning. It should be highly discouraged, as modifying the tracker name introduces a potential hazard to your tracking plan, unless you know what you’re doing.

Google Tag Manager’s Data Layer is something I’ve touched upon in pretty much all of my articles. It’s such an integral part of what makes a tag management solution great and applicable to a host of business scenarios. I’ve also talked at length about the internal data model of Google Tag Manager, and this #GTMTips post is very much related to this rather murky concept.

In this post, we’ll go over the Data Layer Variable Version selection, and I’ll try to explain just what this selector does.

Welcome back my friends (to the show that never ends)! It’s been a couple of weeks since my last barrage of articles, and I think the time is ripe to do some testing!

First things first, here’s a picture of me shovelling snow:

And now back to the topic at hand.

One of the things that seems to be a hot topic in Universal Analytics is cross-domain tracking. I’ve never really tackled the beast head-on, since there’s such a wealth of excellent articles about it out there. However, I have taken a plunge into the deep end with some specific stuff, such as iframe and subdomain tracking.

Tracking YouTube videos in Google Tag Manager is one of the more useful things you can do in terms of tracking. YouTube has a wonderful API that you can tap into and convert the detected events into dataLayer messages.

There are some really good solutions out there for tracking YouTube videos in GTM:

• The wonderful solution by Cardinal Path.

• An even more thorough treatment by Bounteous.

Both do a great job of tracking videos that have been loaded with the page. However, both have difficulties with tracking dynamically loaded videos. That means videos which are loaded lazily, or in pop-ups, or when some content link is clicked.

In Google Analytics for iOS, there are two types of campaign measurement. There’s install campaign measurement, which lets you track the channels which brought your visitors to the App Store, where they proceeded to download your app. There’s also launch campaign tracking, which lets you attribute app launches to specific campaigns.

In this tip post, we’ll tackle the latter. We’ll leverage a feature of the Google Analytics iOS SDK to build the parameters, and then push them to dataLayer so that they can be used in the Tag.

One of the less-known features of Google Tag Manager, a hidden gem if you will, is the URL Source setting in the URL Variable type. It lets you parse any URL String for its components.

Tip 38: Parse URL strings with the URL Source setting

The setting itself is easy to find. Just edit an existing URL Variable, or create a new one. Then, scroll down to the More Settings divider, expand it, and you’ll see the URL Source drop-down list.

For some reason, you might run into a situation where you need to add multiple Google Tag Manager containers on the same page. Usually this is because of poor governance or an inflexible organization. My recommendation is to fix things in your projects first, and only resort to multiple containers if you can’t seem to resolve your governance issues using your vocal cords (or your fists).

Officially, Google Tag Manager introduced support for adding multiple containers earlier in 2015. It’s still not a recommended process, however, and rightfully so. Personally, I hope that development efforts in GTM would be directed towards making a single container more manageable by different parties, rather than adding support for hacks like this.

(UPDATE 28 Sep 2016: The official recommendation has finally caught up with the times. Now the correct placement for the JavaScript methods of the container snippet is, indeed, in <head>.)

I want to address something I’ve been confused about from the very first day since I started using Google Tag Manager. Why on earth would an asynchronously loading JavaScript library be recommended to place in the beginning of <body>, when the logical place to start loading dependencies is as early as possible in the document load process? Well, the main reason for this is that the GTM library makes modifications to the document object model of the page in such a way that might cause conflicts when using Internet Explorer 7 or older.