You are here: Tags / triggers
One of the most versatile triggers in Google Tag Manager is the Custom Event trigger. As its name indicates, you can use it to fire your tags when an event is pushed into dataLayer. This process is at the heart of GTM’s dataLayer system. And it’s not just custom events. Every single trigger type in Google Tag Manager uses the event key in a dataLayer.push(), which is why you’ll see events like gtm.

Continue reading

Trigger Group is the newest trigger type you can add to a tag in Google Tag Manager. It allows you to establish dependencies between multiple triggers, not firing the tag until every trigger in the group has fired at least once. This establishes an interesting new paradigm in Google Tag Manager, because until now it wasn’t possible to create triggers that relied on earlier values of a given key (event in this case).

Continue reading

Over 5 years ago, I wrote an article titled Track Adjusted Bounce Rate In Universal Analytics. It basically explored a number of different methods to tweak the Bounce Rate metric so that it becomes more meaningful in your Google Analytics reports. Now, writing that article wasn’t necessarily my proudest moment. It’s not because the solution was poor, but rather because I was suggesting it makes sense to tweak a metric. The concept of “adjusted Bounce Rate” sounds like the analyst is fixing a metric to be more beneficial to their cause, rather than fixing the business problem that caused the metric to be poor in the first place.

Continue reading

Last updated 9 March 2018 with some new tips. The Scroll Depth trigger in Google Tag Manager has a lot going for it. Tracking how far users scroll down a given page has long since been recognized as an important cog in the engagement tracking machine, and there have been really great solutions for implementing scroll depth tracking for web analytics over the years. With Google Tag Manager’s native Scroll Depth trigger, it’s tempting to think we now have a be-all end-all solution that covers all the bases.

Continue reading

This is one of those #GTMTips posts that I was certain I’d already written. So it came as a mild surprise when I realized I’d never tackled this aspect of Google Tag Manager. It’s a short and sweet tip again. Today we’ll learn how to check if a variable is undefined using Google Tag Manager. Tip 73: Check for undefined variable values If a variable is undefined, it means that a variable with the given name does not currently have any valid value in memory.

Continue reading

Google Tag Manager should be relatively easy to implement. Just paste the container snippet to the <head> of the page and you’re good to go! However, at some point you’ll want to configure the dataLayer structure, too (read more about dataLayer here). There are two ways to do it: the right way and the wrong way. In this article, we’ll see what happens if you do it the wrong way, how to identify the issue, and how to fix it.

Continue reading

This is, by no means, a novel topic in this blog. I’ve covered Google Tag Manager’s event tracking and triggers numerous times before (see below). Auto-Event Tracking In GTM 2.0 #GTMtips: Track Outbound Links In GTM V2 #GTMtips: Fix Problems With GTM Listeners Trigger Guide For Google Tag Manager However, based on the number of queries we still see in the Google Tag Manager Product Forums about event tracking, I believe one particular aspect of GTM’s triggers invites revisiting.

Continue reading

Author's picture

Simo Ahava

Husband | Father | Analytics developer
simo (at) simoahava.com

Senior Data Advocate at Reaktor

Finland