It’s lovely to see small, incremental, quality-of-life improvements to Google Tag Manager amid the behemothian feature releases such as custom templates in 2019 and server-side tagging in 2020. This time around, we’ll take a look at the upgraded search functionality of the Google Tag Manager user interface, which makes search an actually useful tool. In addition to this, we’ll take a look at one of the most requested features in the history of Google Tag Manager, which we finally have access to: bulk actions!

Continue reading

Exporting a container in Google Tag Manager can have many purposes. From backing up Google Tag Manager versions to creating and distributing repositories of useful container snapshots, the container export is one of the most useful non-tagging-related tools that the GTM user interface offers. However, one big misgiving in the feature (until now) has been that exporting just a subset of the container version or workspace has been impossible. It’s always the entire container or nothing.

Continue reading

Last updated 27 April 2023 with details about preventing FPID access in cookieless scenarios. With Server-side tagging, the developer community has a chance to vastly improve the data collection capabilities of Google’s analytics platforms (Universal Analytics and App+Web). The ability to build our own templates is particularly potent with a Server container. However, it’s not as if Google themselves are just sitting idly by and seeing what the community can come up with.

Continue reading

Ever since Server-side tagging was publicly announced at SUPERWEEK 2020, Google and the trusted tester community have been hard at work, building something that just might change the landscape of digital analytics for good. Google Tag Manager has now released Server-side tagging into public beta. In this lengthy article, we’ll take a look at what Server-side tagging is, how it should (and should not) be used, and what its implications are on the broader digital analytics community.

Continue reading

In this step-by-step guide, I’ll show you how to build a Lookup Table generator in Google Sheets, utilizing Apps Script and the Google Tag Manager API. The purpose of the Lookup Table generator is to automate the often tedious task of adding many, many rows to a Lookup Table within the Google Tag Manager UI. There are other solutions for this, but none (as far as I know) that uses the Google Tag Manager API.

Continue reading

Let me start by proclaiming with clarity and sincerity: No, Safari 14 (or any other version of Safari) will not block Google Analytics from loading and running on a website. In the midst of Apple’s yearly Worldwide Developers Conference, the company showcased some of the privacy improvements to the upcoming version of the Safari web browser (version 14). In fact, the biggest revelation was the new Privacy Report, which is designed to elucidate how much the browser is working towards mitigating the damage caused by cross-site trackers.

Continue reading

Recently I published an article on how to set up an impact test for the “flicker effect” omnipresent in client-side A/B-testing tools. Be sure to check out that article first to get some context to what we’re going to be talking about here. In this short follow-up, I’ll show you how to measure the average time of the anti-flicker snippet delaying page visibility, if you choose to deploy the snippet.

Continue reading