Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager introduced the capability to add tests to your Custom Templates. Tests, in this context, refer specifically to unit tests that you write in order to make sure your template code works in a predictable way. Unit tests are also used to drive development, ensuring that you have added contingencies for all the different scenarios that the template, when coupled with user input, might introduce.

In this guide, I’ll introduce how the Tests feature works. Some new APIs are introduced, as well as a grammar of sorts that you might be used to if you’ve already worked with tests in a software development context.

There are lots of different readability formulas out there, which seek to provide an index on how readable any given excerpt of text is. Typically, these formulas output a grade-level score, which indicates, roughly, the level of education required to read the text excerpt with ease.

Any “quality index” that seeks to reduce the complexity of something as multi-faceted as reading should be subject to scrutiny. This is true for Bounce Rate, this is true for Time On Page, and this is true for a readability score.

I’ve written about outbound link click tracking before. It’s a very solid way to track interactions on the site, as clicking a link that leads away from a site is a signal of … well, something.

In Google Tag Manager it’s now extremely easy and efficient to track outbound link clicks, thanks to the introduction of a new configuration in the Auto-Event variable.

This article will introduce the new method and show you how you can quickly set it up!

When previewing Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager you’ve almost certainly run into a situation where the GTM variable shows up as a weird JavaScript method resembling something like this:

google_tag_manager["GTM-ABCD123"].macro(15)

And this is when you were expecting it to show the actual, resolved value!

It doesn’t help that every now and then the preview mode actually shows to correct value in the preview mode.

What’s up with that? Well, there’s a fairly logical explanation to this. Read on!

There are thousands upon thousands of bots, crawlers, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies out there doing nothing but crawling through websites and harvesting the content within for whatever purposes they have been fine-tuned to. While Google Analytics provides a bot filtering feature to filter out “spam” and “bot traffic” from views, this is far from comprehensive enough to tackle all instances of bot traffic that might enter the site.

You might have noticed bot traffic in your data even if you have bot filtering toggled on. For instance, such traffic could be characterized as follows:

Since the introduction of custom templates in May 2019, the community (myself included) has been anxiously waiting for some official solution for curating and distributing templates created by the community.

Now, finally, we have it. It’s called the Community Template Gallery! Read Google’s announcement in this blog post.

I’m not going to go over the basics in this article, since Google’s own documentation stands fine on its own feet. However, I do want to discuss some of the ways in which you can streamline updating and sharing those lovely templates you’ve created.

Sometimes, in Google Tag Manager’s Debug mode, you’ll see tags appear with the status Still Running, and you’ll (eventually) notice that these tags are not doing what they are supposed to be doing.

When you see this message on a tag, it technically means this:

The tag failed to signal Google Tag Manager that it is “done”.

The technical explanation is, naturally, too simple to be useful. In this article, I’ll explore what “done” means, and how especially Google Analytics tags manifest this behavior.

I’ve enjoyed working with custom templates for Google Tag Manager. A lot. So much so that whenever the need to add some custom code to a container emerges, my first thought is how to turn that into a custom template.

Google has been forthcoming in introducing new APIs steadily, and I think the variety of things you can do with template is improving with every new API release.

In this article, I’ll show you how to use a simple tag template for distributing your users to groups, based on a random split.

A surprisingly common question in forums and communities seems to be why the built-in Click variables show up as undefined in Google Tag Manager’s Preview mode, even if you click around the site.

In this article, I’ll walk you through some of the reasons why this might happen.

Tip 104: What to do when Click variables are undefined

Here’s the situation: you want to create a Click trigger for your tags, but in order to do so, you’d need to see what values the built-in Click variables (e.g. Click Classes, Click ID) get. Thus, it’s a chick-and-the-egg situation - you can’t create the trigger until you know what to track, and you can’t track until you create the trigger.

A while ago, I published an article on how to build an Android application, and bundle it with Firebase. The purpose of that article, and the one you are reading now, is to slowly introduce the world of mobile app development and Firebase, given the latter is getting more and more traction as Google’s go-to analytics platform.

After finishing work on the Android guide, I immediately started working on its counterpart for iOS, and that’s the one you’re reading now.