There’s a new listener in town! It’s a few days now since the Google Tag Manager team unleashed the History Listener, and the time has come for me to tell you what this baby can do. The History Listener is designed to be used on websites where content is loaded dynamically. Typically, these websites make heavy use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), which is designed for loading content in the background and serving it dynamically without having to reload the page.

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There is a new version of this guide for GTM V2 here. (Last updated April 2014) I see Google Tag Manager’s operational model as an analogy of Montesquieu’s three-branched government theory (don’t leave just yet, I’m getting somewhere with this). We have the legislative power of tags (what should be done), the judiciary power of macros (explore the context and circumstance of each tag), and the executive power of rules (make the tag happen).

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Here are a few quotes I found on the web regarding tag management and IT departments: Relief of IT department bottlenecks – once the Tag Manager is deployed, new tags can be implemented directly by Marketing with no IT department involvement. This is a huge benefit for large websites, where IT is oftentimes a bottleneck. Original text here IT Issues - when you use a TMS like 'Google Tag Manager' you are bypassing the IT department.

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When push comes to shove, I’m a pretty lazy guy. I enjoy nothing more than just to stretch my legs on a couch, pick up my iPad, and read what’s going on in the world. I skip the news, since they’re just full of depressing stories. Instead, I head over to my favorite Google+ communities to see what’s new in the blogosphere. This approach has led me to some pretty amazing individuals, whom I follow like a suckerfish.

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Ever so often I come across a Google Tag Manager setup where GTM’s own auto-event listeners don’t perform the task they were supposed to. Listener problems seem to be a hot topic in Google+ and the Product Forums as well. There may be many reasons why your listeners don’t work, but a very common trend is that you have conflicting JavaScript libraries or scripts running on your page. Let’s explore how listeners work before tackling the problem.

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I’ve written a new Variable Guide for Google Tag Manager, which covers the new GTM UI. This guide is for the old UI. You might be vaguely familiar with macros if you’ve ever used a computer. Basically, whenever you perform a complicated task with a simple gesture, or reuse complex code with a simple input mechanism, you’re using macros. Think keyboard shortcuts. In Google Tag Manager, this is the essence of macros.

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Having just come hot of the press with my latest article on GTM and Content Grouping which, to my delight, Bounteous had written an amazing tutorial on earlier, Brian Kuhn and the amazing Google Tag Manager development team came out with another incredible new feature: The Lookup Table Macro. In software engineering, a lookup table is an array which takes away a layer of complexity in runtime computation, and replaces it with a simple value assignment based on array indexing.

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