Sending personally identifiable information (PII) to Google Analytics is one of the things you should really avoid doing. For one, it’s against the terms of service of the platform, but also you will most likely be in violation of national, federal, or EU legislation drafted to protect the privacy of individuals online. In this #GTMTips post, I’ll show you a way to make sure that any tags you configure this solution with will not contain strings that might be construed as PII.

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The steady increase in mobile use over the last years has introduced some new challenges for web analytics. It’s not just about mismatches in the tracking model (the concept of sessions is even more absurd for apps than it is for desktop browsing), but about something more fundamental, more basic. Think about it: if a visitor visits the website using a mobile device, there’s a significant chance of them losing internet connectivity and going unintentionally offline.

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

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More often than not, much of what we do in web analytics can be automated. This applies especially to implementations, audits, configurations, and reporting. So when I’m faced with a menial, manual task that might take hours for me to complete if done by hand, I always look at what could be done with some scripting and API work. I want to introduce a couple of Google Sheets add-ons I’ve written and released to the public.

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Tracking what a user selects in a drop-down (or select) list/menu can be very useful. This is particularly the case when the selection immediately does something, such as initiate a download or navigate the user to another page. But even if there is no immediate action, it’s still interesting to know what selections users might be doing, if only to uncover yet another piece of the engagement puzzle. Here’s the Google Tag Manager way to do it!

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Facebook’s pixel has an attribute named content_ids (required for Dynamic Ads), which requires an Array of content IDs as its value. It’s very possible you’re running this pixel on a site which already has Enhanced Ecommerce for Universal Analytics implemented, and now you want to use the same Enhanced Ecommerce data that your developers have already made available in this Facebook pixel. Or perhaps you want to concatenate a list of strings, such as article tags (['culture', 'politics']), and send it as a comma-separated string to Google Analytics ('culture,politics').

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Here we are again, revisiting an old theme. When using Google Tag Manager, we often want to send the contents of the same tag to multiple Universal Analytics properties. With on-page GA, this used to be quite simple, as all you had to do was create a new tracker and then just remember to run the ga('trackerName.send'...) commands to all the trackers (or you could use my duplicator plugin). With GTM, your options are more limited, since Google Tag Manager abstracts the tracker object, giving you far fewer tools to work with.

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