Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics on Simo Ahava's blog

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.

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.

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With the rise of ad and content blockers (think Ghostery and uBlock Origin), as well as browser tracking protections (see www.cookiestatus.com), marketing technology vendors have their work cut out for them.

Since updating to Google Chrome 83, you might have noticed that Google Tag Manager’s Preview mode no longer works when browsing Chrome in Incognito mode.

The is an unofficial template for Userpilot.

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.

On New Year’s Eve 2018, I published an article which instructed how to scrape pages of a site and write the results into Google BigQuery.

You can use this tag to randomly assign users to buckets, and then to store this information in a first-party cookie.

This is an unofficial template for the Facebook Customer Chat SDK.

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.

This is the official template for the Snowplow Analytics SDK.

“Flickering” or “Flash Of Original Content” (FOOC) is a phenomenon where there’s a (typically) slight but observable delay in the browser updating the site or element layout if the user is included in a variant group for experimentation.

This template is meant to be used with the Snowplow Analytics tag template.

When custom templates were released for Google Tag Manager, I updated my workflow for working with GTM.

The shadow DOM is a way to add HTML structures to the web page so that they remain isolated from the rest of the document object model (DOM).

One of the most versatile triggers in Google Tag Manager is the Custom Event trigger.

This is an unofficial template for the IP Geolocation API.

With the proliferation of gtag.js implementations, we can see that there’s a small-ish paradigm shift in how to implement Google’s stack of marketing tools.

This is an unofficial template for Qualaroo.

This tag stores the page referrer and URL parameters in a browser cookie.

One of my passion projects has been to create custom templates for Google Tag Manager’s community template gallery.

I’ve covered the more pervasive issue with tags not firing in Google Tag Manager in my article on the “Still Running” status.

The is an unofficial template for the YouTube Iframe API.

With so many people working from home or remotely in these turbulent times, it’s time to revisit one of my oldest articles, and discuss the options you have for excluding or segmenting internal traffic in Google Analytics.

With the enforcement of SameSite settings in the latest versions of Google Chrome, it’s become a mad scramble to get cookies working across first-party and third-party contexts.

With iOS and Android containers available for Google Tag Manager, it’s tempting to add GTM as an integration into an existing Firebase setup for your apps.

One of the hard-and-fast rules in Google Analytics is that once hits have been collected and processed into your data properties, those hits are untouchable.

Until recently, I had a feature on GTM Tools that polled the user’s Google Tag Manager container(s) for a recently published version.

Updated 25 May 2021: Added information about using this with GA4.

Update 6 April 2020: I updated the template in the gallery to the latest version of the IP Geolocation API SDK, which no longer requires jQuery.

One of the most prominent features of Google Tag Manager since the dawn of time (actually, late 2012) is the Custom HTML tag.

One of the prime things to use Google Tag Manager for is script injection.

Update 6 April 2020: I updated the template in the gallery to the latest version of the IP Geolocation API SDK, which no longer requires jQuery.

Use this template to load hosted libraries from the CDNJS content distribution network.

Update 17 February 2020: Google Tag Manager’s Preview mode cookies have been updated with the necessary flags, so they will not break once SameSite enforcement begins.

This template can be used to replace the built-in URL variable type.

Universal Analytics utilizes two components (by default) to attribute a browser session to a specific campaign: query parameters in the URL and the referrer string.

This template takes an array of objects, and produces a string where the values of one of the given keys in these objects is concatenated into a single string.

Google Tag Manager now lets you add unit tests directly to your custom templates.

Use this template to set up a monitoring system for Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager introduced the capability to add tests to your Custom Templates.

In Google Analytics: App + Web, you collect events.

There are lots of different readability formulas out there, which seek to provide an index on how readable any given excerpt of text is.

I’ve written about outbound link click tracking before.

When previewing Custom HTML tags in Google Tag Manager you’ve almost certainly run into a situation where the GTM variable shows up as a weird JavaScript method resembling something like this: google_tag_manager["GTM-ABCD123"].macro(15) And this is when y…

There are thousands upon thousands of bots, crawlers, spiders, and other creepy-crawlies out there doing nothing but crawling through websites and harvesting the content within for whatever purposes they have been fine-tuned to.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing short (and sometimes a bit longer) bite-sized tips for my #GTMTips topic.

This is an unofficial template for the Conductrics library.

This is an unofficial template for the AppNexus pixel.