CustomTask - The Guide

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.

The customTask API is a feature of the Universal Analytics library (used by Google Tag Manager’s tags, too). It lets you get and set values from and to the (Measurement Protocol) hit as it’s being generated. This is really useful for a couple of reasons, which I’ve covered in the previous articles, but I’ll go over them briefly in the beginning of this guide, too.

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#GTMTips: Edit Google Analytics Tag Settings

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. This #GTMTips article is a very quick tip to show you how to reveal tag-specific settings without using a Google Analytics Settings variable.

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#GTMTips: Fix Missing Page View Event and Broken Triggers

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.

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Snowplow: Full Setup With Google Analytics Tracking

A recent guide of mine introduced the Google Analytics adapter in Snowplow. The idea was that you can duplicate the Google Analytics requests sent via Google Tag Manager and dispatch them to your Snowplow analytics pipeline, too. The pipeline then takes care of these duplicated requests, using the new adapter to automatically align the hits with their corresponding data tables, ready for data modeling and analysis.

While testing the new adapter, I implemented a Snowplow pipeline from scratch for parsing data from my own website. This was the first time I’d done the whole process from end-to-end myself, so I thought it might be prudent to document the process for the benefit of others who might want to take a jab at Snowplow but are intimidated by the moving parts.

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#GTMTips: Automatically Duplicate Google Analytics Hits to Snowplow

I’m back with another customTask tip, but this time I’m exploring some new territory. Snowplow just introduced their latest version update, which included (among other things) an adapter for processing Google Analytics payloads. Never heard of Snowplow? It’s a collection of open-source libraries designed to let you build your own analytics pipeline, all the way from data collection, through ETL (extract, transform, load), using custom enrichments and JSON schemas, and finally into your own data warehouse, where you can then analyze the data using whatever tools you find preferable. Everything is designed to run over Amazon Web Services, so you don’t need to invest in local server hardware or hosting services.

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#GTMTips: Simple Custom Event Listeners With Google Tag Manager

First of all, check out this article for an overview of how custom event listeners work in Google Tag Manager. The reason I’m writing this #GTMTips article is that I want to upgrade the solution slightly, and I want to bring it back into the spotlight. Why? Because it’s still one of the most effective ways to customize your Google Tag Manager implementation.

A custom event listener is a handler you write with JavaScript. It lets you handle any JavaScript DOM events, such as click, form submit, mouse hover, drag, touch, error, page load and unload, and so many more. It also lets you leverage the useCapture parameter which will prove very helpful if you have other JavaScript on the site interfering with GTM’s default event triggers.

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New Tools Released

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been coding like crazy. The three biggest outcomes of this frenzy have been this new blog design (switched finally away from WordPress and took the plunge back into the world static sites using Hugo), a new Google Sheets add-on for managing Google Tag Manager containers and assets, and a Slack integration in GTM Tools. In this article, I’ll quickly introduce the last two, as I’m writing a separate article about the site redesign.

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Send Event and Custom Dimension if Google Optimize Experiment Is Running

I really like Google Optimize. It has a fairly intuitive UI, setting up experiments is easy, and there’s integrations for both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics built into the system. It’s still a JavaScript-based, client-side A/B-testing tool, so problems with flicker and asynchronous loading are ever-present (though this is somewhat mitigated by the page-hiding snippet).

One issue with the Google Analytics integration is the difficulty of creating segments for sessions where the users were actively participating in the experiment. In fact, there’s no specific signal in Google Analytics that tells you the NOW the user is “experiencing” an experiment. You’ll find the Experiment Name and Experiment ID dimensions, yes, but they have one drawback:

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The Scroll Depth Trigger in Google Tag Manager

Scroll depth tracking in web analytics is one of those things you simply must do, especially if you have a content-heavy site. Tracking scroll depth not only gives you an indication of how much users are digesting your content, but it also lets you turn meaningless metrics such as Bounce Rate into something far more useful.

If you’ve already been tracking scroll depth in Google Tag Manager, you’ve probably been using either Rob Flaherty’s brilliant Scroll Depth jQuery plugin, or Bounteous’ equally ingenious Scroll Tracking recipe. I’m sure you’ll be very pleased to know that Google Tag Manager just released a native Scroll Depth trigger, with which setting up scroll depth tracking will be a doozy!

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The Element Visibility Trigger in Google Tag Manager

Holy visibility, Batman! Visibility is a seriously undervalued aspect of web analytics tracking. Too often, we fall into the trap of thinking that “Page Views” actually have something to do with “viewing” a page. Or that tracking scrolling to 25%, 50%, or 75% of vastly different pages makes sense on the aggregate level. So you will be very pleased to know that the Google Tag Manager team (who have been on FIRE recently), have just published the Element Visibility trigger. And oh BOY what a trigger it is!

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