When using the All Elements trigger in Google Tag Manager, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it captures all clicks on the page. It’s also brutally accurate - it captures clicks on the exact element that was below the mouse button when a click happened. This means that when working with the All Elements trigger, you need to be more careful when identifying the correct element you actually want to track clicks on. Read More…
A while ago, I published a #GTMTips article, where I showed how you can add HTML elements to the page programmatically using Google Tag Manager. This is relevant because GTM’s validators prevent you from adding custom parameters to HTML elements that are injected directly via the Custom HTML tag. To circumvent this validation, you need to create the element programmatically, before appending it to the document. A while ago, Matteo Gamba asked me a question related to the Facebook Customer Chat Plugin. Read More…
Last updated 13 March 2024: Clarified that you can add a trigger like Initialization – All Pages as a Custom Evaluation to give the Zone full access to page state. Google Tag Manager supports loading multiple containers on the same page. It’s useful if you have multiple companies or organizations working on the same site, but for one reason or another (e.g. governance) you want to restrict access to your main container. Read More…
When you use the dataLayer.push() command on a page with a Google Tag Manager container, you pass information to GTM’s internal data model and potentially fire tags (if the push() contained an event key). You can also add the eventCallback key to these pushes. The value of this key should be a function, and this function is then executed once the container finishes processing any tags that might have fired on that dataLayer. Read More…
Last updated 9 March 2018 with some new tips. The Scroll Depth trigger in Google Tag Manager has a lot going for it. Tracking how far users scroll down a given page has long since been recognized as an important cog in the engagement tracking machine, and there have been really great solutions for implementing scroll depth tracking for web analytics over the years. With Google Tag Manager’s native Scroll Depth trigger, it’s tempting to think we now have a be-all end-all solution that covers all the bases. Read More…
One of the annoying quirks of Google Tag Manager is that it strips out any non-standard HTML attributes from elements you add to Custom HTML tags. I’m using “non-standard” as a qualifier here, because I don’t have an exhaustive list of attributes that are ignored. But at least data attributes (e.g. data-id) and attributes with custom names (e.g. aria-labelledby) are either stripped out upon injection, or GTM might actually prevent you from even saving the container if the Custom HTML tag has elements with these attributes. Read More…
This is one of those #GTMTips posts that I was certain I’d already written. So it came as a mild surprise when I realized I’d never tackled this aspect of Google Tag Manager. It’s a short and sweet tip again. Today we’ll learn how to check if a variable is undefined using Google Tag Manager. Tip 73: Check for undefined variable values If a variable is undefined, it means that a variable with the given name does not currently have any valid value in memory. Read More…
Last updated 4 September 2018 If you have been reading my blog articles over the past year, you might have noticed a disturbing trend. I’ve published 9 articles on customTask since the API was released. It might not sound like much, but I can’t think of a single feature in Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager that has so completely convinced me of its usefulness in such a short time. Read More…
When the Google Analytics Settings variable was introduced in May 2017, it resulted in a significant change in the Google Analytics tag user interface in Google Tag Manager. The default UI for editing a tag was stripped down of all GA-specific settings, and the new Google Analytics Settings drop-down was the replacement. Unfortunately, the bulk of Google Tag Manager articles online (including those on this blog) still refer to the old interface in screenshots and instructions. Read More…
Google Tag Manager should be relatively easy to implement. Just paste the container snippet to the <head> of the page and you’re good to go! However, at some point you’ll want to configure the dataLayer structure, too (read more about dataLayer here). There are two ways to do it: the right way and the wrong way. In this article, we’ll see what happens if you do it the wrong way, how to identify the issue, and how to fix it. Read More…