User Interface

If you open the Google Tag Manager user interface and browser your tags, triggers, and variables, you might notice that the UI now has two new features:

1. Pagination, where only 50 results are shown per page

2. A quick search / filter bar at the top of each list, which lets you narrow the list down to results that match your query

Pagination might be a nuisance in large containers, but it was implemented to improve performance. Fetching the list of assets and rendering them on the screen can be a pretty hefty amount of API work, especially if the container is bloated. By introducing pagination, only 50 items are processed at a time, which speeds up the UI. However, being forced to plow through pages of assets can get tedious.

It’s been a crazy week. Just crazy. Not only did Google Tag Manager introduce Workspaces, arguably one of its most important releases ever for GTM, but they also revamped the user interface! So very big changes have been underfoot, and I’m so happy to be writing about them, because in my completely biased opinion these changes are amazing and well worth the long wait.

In this article, I want to quickly walk you through what I think are the most meaningful changes in the interface. A lot has changed, but the underlying mechanisms of GTM are still the same. You’re still creating Tags, Triggers, and Variables, and you’re still debugging the container using Debug Mode. However, the new user interfaces enhances and streamlines the various creation processes in the container, and the new Abandon / View Changes feature allows you to debug and diff the changes you or your team has made.

Well, well, well. Welcome to the Enterprise Game, Google Tag Manager! You know, if you took a look at all the feature requests and complaints that pass through the Google+ community or the Product Forums, you’d notice that a large portion of them revolve around lack of multi-user and multi-team support in the tool. Well GTM has taken a gigantic leap forward to soothe these concerns, with the release of its latest feature: WORKSPACES.