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(Update 19 November 2018: See this article for a more elegant solution.)

If you know your JavaScript, you know that all variables, functions, objects, resources, and data in the document get rewritten with every page load. In other words, every single page refresh builds the page from scratch, and the state of the document before the page refresh is left drifting in the ocean of oblivion.

Google Tag Manager’s dataLayer is also one such entity. It gets rewritten with every page load, so it’s not possible to have a dataLayer variable persist from one page to the other without using cookies or, as I’m going to show in this guide, the HTML5 Web Storage API. For web analytics, this is a bit of a shame. It forces us to think of things in the scope of a single page, when rarely anything worth mentioning has a lifespan that short.

There’s a much easier, native-to-GTM way to do this now: the Matches CSS Selector.

Behind this tragically boring title is a simple solution to many problems with Google Tag Manager’s auto-event tracking. The common denominator to these problems is poor website markup. Selectors are used sparingly, and element hierarchy is messy. This disregard for proper node relationships means you have to resort to Data Layer Variable Macros which look like

gtm.element.parentElement.parentElement.id

(UPDATE 1 Oct 2014 Due to a change in how macros work in Debug Mode, the {{generic event handler}} macro no longer works when testing in Debug Mode. That means that you’ll have to test your custom listener in a live container (I know, ouch!). If you want to test in Debug Mode, you’ll have to skip using the {{generic event handler}} as a macro, and instead copy the inner function into the Custom HTML Tag, give the function a name, and use that as the callback in addEventListener or attachEvent.

It’s been an awesome summer, with temperatures soaring in the global warming range throughout our northern country. The heat has given me ample reason to not be near a computer, but now it’s time to mine some JavaScript wisdom again. Here’s the second part of my JavaScript for Google Tag Manager series. The first part focused on GTM specific tips and tricks, and I hope that while reading it, you were treated to another grand example of the flexibility of this wonderful tool.

I created a new Chrome Extension: Internalize for Google Analytics. This is its very first version. It only works on websites with Universal Analytics.

Click here to download Internalize for Google Analytics v1.0

The idea is that with the extension you can push a custom dimension value to your currently active session. You can then use a profile filter in GA to block traffic with this custom dimension value. It’s useful when blocking internal traffic with more traditional means (IP address or various GTM workarounds) won’t work.

Analyzing what people write in your site search field is pretty much one of the smartest things you can do for your website tracking. If certain terms pop up over and over again in internal search reports, it means that your site is not providing the answers people are looking for, meaning you have an excellent opportunity to provide supply for the demand!

However, not all site search applications are trackable out-of-the-box. In this post, I go over three scenarios, and I provide three solutions for tackling internal site search problems in Google Tag Manager.

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.

Apologies for leaving you hanging. It’s now almost three weeks since I published the first part of this post, and I’m sure you’ve been holding your breath ever since.

There’s been a lot going on since the last post. First, my favorite sports team in the world, San Antonio Spurs, won their fifth NBA championship from the defending champs, Miami Heat. Next, my wife and I moved to our new house, and we’ve been remodeling ever since. It’s been hectic with work and life getting mixed up in a potpourri of saw dust and web analytics, but now it’s time to return back to the wonderful world of Google Tag Manager!

It’s time to dig into my tip library for some pretty cool things you can do with Google Tag Manager to enhance your site tagging. Some of these are macro magic through and through, some of these are best practices, and some of these are things that will make your life easier while managing a tag management solution.

I’ve split this post into two parts to make it more Hobbit and less Lord Of the Rings length-wise.

That’s right, I changed the name! Huge thanks to Paul Gailey for the inspiration.

Get the latest version of GTM Sonar here.

Just a minor update this time. I added some informative text to the pop-up, along with an error screen if something goes wrong.

Another change is that now when an element is added to debugDL, a counter on the Browser Action icon will start climbing, representing the number of objects in the array. Cool!