Google Tag Manager has a new, AI-powered feature. It’s not flashy, it’s not prominent, and it’s not something you’d make a big deal out of. However, it contributes to an absolutely vital part of container management that many, many people neglect: version naming.
With this new feature, Google Tag Manager generates a Version Name and Version Description automatically from your workspace changes.
Container versions are often named lazily or not named at all. However, proper naming ensures that the version history is actually useful. Having a consistent log of what was updated makes it easier to review key milestones in the container history, and it also helps avoid this:
The feature is set on by default in GTM containers, and it’s available in the version creation flow. Read on for more details.
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Tip 144: Automatically generate version information
After you’ve made changes (and previewed them) in your container, you typically click Submit to either publish the workspace directly or first create a version of it.
Now you’ll see a new Generating… label in the Version Name field when the overlay first appears.
Once done, it will automatically produce a Version Name and Version Description with a list of things that were changed. If you want to run the generation process again (for example if you make a change to the workspace without closing the overlay), you can hit the Generate button to have it churn out a new name and description for the version.
Here’s an important detail (applies to all AI generation):
Use this as a starting point! Make sure you review the version name and description, and add any vital changes the generator might have missed. It doesn’t produce an exhaustive list of all that was changed. It seems to focus on what it considers to be the most important and significant changes, but even this might be different from one generation cycle to the next.
For example, in the image above it neglected to mention that I actually paused 29 tags before hitting the Submit button! This seems like a pretty significant deal, but the generator didn’t mention it. So to make it more accurate, I would then manually update the version name and description to include this detail.
AI generation isn’t perfect, but it’s a good starting point to nudge GTM users to better annotate their container versions. Your future self will thank you for this!
Perhaps there will be an option to disable this at some point. I don’t really see any concerns with using this feature, after all Google already has visibility to everything that’s in your container, so running an AI model on those resources isn’t probably something to worry about. But I completely understand how many people have had enough of AI in every nook and cranny of the services they love to use, and disabling this automatic version annotation is something they’d appreciate.
What do you think of this feature?
