Environments

Google Tag Manager, our favorite free tag management solution, has always struggled with its enterprise-worthiness. There are many features still lacking, most of which have to do with working in multi-user environments. Now, grab the last word of that sentence (see what I did there), and hug it tightly, for GTM just introduced a new, enterprise-friendly feature: Environments.

These Environments are actually browser cookies, which you use to link a Google Tag Manager container state with the browser of the user who needs to or wants to view that particular state. In other words, if you have a QA (quality assurance) process, as you should have, or if you do most of your testing on a staging server, as you should do, you can create an Environment in GTM, after which you can publish container versions (even the draft) into that particular Environment alone.