I'm currently working on blocking the scripts injected by gtm and I noticed there's a way to add allowlist or blocklist inside datalayer to reach that: https://developers.google.com/tag-manager/web/restrict
But after trying to add the gtm.allowlist/blocklist, it still injects the 3rd party scripts
Anyone who had any experience on that? Many thx
The best way to allow the delivery of a tag is to associate the correct trigger based on the classification of the cookies you assign.
With OneTrust (you are using) the cookie (or the OnetrustActiveGroups variable) that contains the information of the accepted cookie classes will contextually contain the values C0001, C0002, c0003, C0004, ... If for example the category C0004 is for cookies may be set through our site by our
advertising partners, to GTM Facebook tags, Ads tags, etc ... you will assign as a trigger the check that in that variable there is that value. If it is present the tag is fired otherwise not.
In this way everything is much more controlled and you leave nothing to chance or to the interpretation of the tool.
Related
I was just about to set up a 2nd GA property that I would implement into my Staging environment. I figured i'd do the same with GTM and just export/import containers from Stage to Production whenever necessary. I also figured I'd dynamically populate the Tracking-ID dynamically based on hostname. No big deal.
But then I stumbled across Environments for GTM. The first bit I read said that using this feature would solve the problem of moving code across environments. To me this implied that the snippet code would remain the same in all environments and that there would be no need to change (dynamically, via build script, manually or otherwise) any values or anything... that GTA was smart enough to deploy the right container(s) to the right place(s) at the right time(s). That sounds great, I'll do it.
Now that I'm getting into that process I'm learning (if I'm understanding correctly) that each environment does in face have to have a separate snippet. So now I"m back to where I started, with having to dynamically add values to the snippets based on domain name (which determines stage or test). With out that, every time the file containing the snippet is pushed between environments, it will contain the wrong values. I guess using Environments still takes out the export/import process for containers (which, don't get me wrong, is nice) but having to change those values is a pain..
Is this the long and short of it - do I have this right? Is there any way around having to change code in the web page (or template) by doing it somehow through GTM instead? I'm guessing not, since the snippet is the base of GTM's functionality, but i figure I'd ask.
Further complicating things is that I was planning to use a Wordpress plugin, Google Tag Manager for Wordpress, to add the GTM code. in this case, all I can even change is is the Tracking-ID, which actually stays the same... it's other values that change that I have no control over with the plugin. Is anyone aware of a way to inject new values into the snippet that the plugin writes to the page?
The snippet for an environment has the same GTM id, but has a token for the environment name attached to the GTM url. If you use any kind of build system it should be possible to set or change the token according to the server you deploy to. Personally I am not convinced that environments are really useful.
If all you need is different values for tracking ids, you can implement lookup table variables that take hostname variable as input and return the respective tracking id for live or staging. Then use that instead of hardcoding the tracking id into your tag.
I was reading about GDPR and GTM here https://www.analyticsmania.com/post/gdpr-cookie-consent-notification-with-google-tag-manager/
basically how to make GTM gdpr valid.
the issue I saw, was that I don't know how to read any GTM variables from outside of GTM. E.g. in that guide, they store a variable or function that will figure if consent was given or not. How can I read, utilize functions and react to events from outside of GTM?
say I run my little javascript file myapp.js on the page. In there I want to for example not add youtube video embeds in case of they have not given consent. Or add videos and share links if they gave consent. This is not something I can do via GTM obviously.
Well the dataLayer variable is public so you can read it at any time it just might be a little hard to find an specific value since you need to move though an array.
If you want to use a javascript variable on your site as a GTM variable then the variable needs to have global and not local scope (the dataLayer is global but you need to perform a dataLayer.push() to add items to the array).
If the javascript variable on the site is responsible for other site functions and has global scope, then either reference it using a GTM javascript variable or custom javascript variable and use it to act as the trigger exception.
The alternative is to have the site logic prevent the GTM snippet from loading. In the GDPR perfect world, you would have granular opt-out depending on the tags in GTM. You could create a form on site with opt-outs for specific tags, however, that data needs to be stored per customer and delivered to the dataLayer to perform tag specific opt-out functionality.
Can you expand on the logic you are attempting to reference from the site?
I am working on a third party website that contains a web application embedded in an iframe on the home page. This iframe is hosted on the same same sub/domain.
Currently page views are being tracked with _trackPageview. Due to a requirement by marketing both pages use the same Google account Id.
Since the iFrame was implemented the marketing department has noticed that the bounce rate has dropped to almost nothing. I suspect that this is because Google is interpreting the pageView event on the iframe as the visitor hitting another page on the website.
Just for additional information, the domain of the _gaq object is being set to "none" for both the container page and iframe.
Does Google provide a mechanism by which you can trigger PageView in such a way that it isn't interpreted as subsequent pageview in this scenario? (I know that trackEvent has a noninteraction property to deal with this?)
Am I better off just disabling the PageView for the default iframe page?
Does Google provide a mechanism - apparently yes, but probably not for your use case.
The field documentation for Universal Analytics describes the non-interaction field thusly:
Specifies that a hit be considered non-interactive.
So in UA this does no seem limited to events but to apply to all hits (which would include pageviews). I want to point out that I have no tested it and that it seems counterintutive, so it might simply be that the documentation is incomplete/wrong here.
However as you are using "classical" Analytics this does not apply to you. Since upgrading the code is a good idea in any case you might want to push for an update to Universal Analytics (this piqued my curiosity so I will test this over the next few days and update this answer with the results - maybe you want to wait until then, or simply test it yourself).
It's possible, but not 100% clear to me that disabling the PageView event on the iframe will prevent your users from registering a page exit (the pageview may get recorded regardless). You can try removing that event and see if it works.
But a better way may be to implement a custom filter on a new View excluding traffic to that specific class of iframes. Make sure you keep your old View (or create a new one with further filters) to make sure you're capturing those iframe views, if you think that's necessary.
I'm using the Google Analytics Flex API to record data from a Flex application.
As I understand it, Google Analytics has a 3-tier hierarchy: An Account can contain one or more Properties, each of which can contain one or more Profiles. A UA code is associated with a Property, and Filters can be used to record specific traffic to a specific Profile.
The application lives on 5 different server environments (development, staging, live, etc) and we need to separate the data from the different environments.
Note that the server environments do not live within the same domain name. For example, staging is at staging.x.com, but the live version is at www.y.com. But I want them all to share the same UA code, so we are tracking them as 5 different Profiles.
So I have one Property with multiple Profiles. I set up a Filter for each Profile saying "Include only traffic form the domains that are equal to" and the particular hostname for that server environment.
The "Default URL" for the Property is set to the hostname of the default Profile, which is the live environment.
We set up that configuration yesterday, and today there is no data in any of our Profiles. We had data the day before (before doing the reconfiguration). I am confident that the tracking code in the client app is sending the hits to GA, since I can see them in Chrome debug mode, and the client app wasn't changed between the day before yesterday and yesterday. The only thing that changed was the configuration of the Property and the Profiles.
So obviously I'm missing something about Property and Profile configuration. Some specific questions:
Am I understanding Filters correctly? Is it somehow applying the Filter to the entire Property? It seemed like the Filters were at the Profile level.
Does the "Default URL" for the Property have an effect on which hits are recorded? What exactly is it used for?
Is there some restriction on how the Profiles within a Property can be affiliated? For example, do they have to belong to the same domain name? I thought not, but maybe I'm wrong?
Any other suggestions?
Obviously, I can experiment with the configuration and see what happens. But I have to wait until the next day to see the effects of each change. Thanks for helping.
Am I understanding Filters correctly? Is it somehow applying the
Filter to the entire Property? It seemed like the Filters were at the
Profile level.
Yes Filters are always applied at the profile level.
Does the "Default URL" for the Property have an effect on which hits
are recorded? What exactly is it used for?
The "Default URL" has no effect on data collection or filtering at all. It's only used to create links from the page reports back to your site. So when you see the top page being /index.html and you click the little link beside it it will take you to "Default URL"/index.html . So you might break that specific feature if the url doesn't exist on you domain. But for the sake of reporting it's completely fine to use a different url.
Is there some restriction on how the Profiles within a Property can be
affiliated? For example, do they have to belong to the same domain
name? I thought not, but maybe I'm wrong?
No, the Profiles inside a Web Property don't need to share the same domain name. It's perfectly fine to have multiple profiles filtered by hostname and it's completely fine and normal to have a global profile with data from multiple hostnames. In that last case the data may be a little off unless you implement Cross Domain Tracking.
Any other suggestions?
It seems that you have a very good understanding of how things work in GA. One thing that you might have missed and #jk commented about is that you should always have an unfiltered profile on you Web Property to avoid losing data due to bad filters.
Another thing to notice is that in the past I had problems with the predefined domain filters. It seems they were being aplied to the wrong field inside Google Analytics. I think they were being applied to the "Visitor ISP Organization". For that reason I never use predefined filters. So if you are using predefined filters you might consider changing them to Custom Include fields, select the "Hostname" metric and enter the domain you want to filter as a RegExp. I believe this bug should be fixed by now, but you never know, I just lost confidence in the predefined filters on that day.
If you acidentaly used 2 include filters in a profile that filter on the hostname but with different values chances are they are canceling each other. So you might want to go into each profile and check if they only contain one include filter each.
eg:
Include only trafic from x.com
Include only trafic from y.com
This will result in a profile with no data.
Another thing to notice is that filters don't apply to retroactive data. So if you apply a filter today to a profile it will only filter data from now on. Data that has already been processed will be elft untouched. There's no way to change data that has been added to a profile, nor to add retroactive data to a new profile.
Other than that you are probably good.
I'm creating a shareable widget, for anyone to copy onto their website. The shareable piece of code is an frame that points to the actual widget that lives on our hosted site (i.e. ourdomain.com). If we ever want to tweak the actual widget, we can do so in one place, with no effect on the iframes pointing to it from other sites we have no control over.
I tried the approach of cross domain tracking. While I was analyzing the results, I observed that the path of the shared widget code (not on our domain) appears within the content view in GA. This runs counter to a response from my previous post "if it is being inserted into many domains you are going to need to set up multiple GA accounts and use different account numbers per user."
Correct me if I am wrong: Any tracking code using our unique account id will appear in our GA by default, no matter where it's hosted, whether the code is implementing cross domain tracking or not.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Analytics/thread?tid=6af5b4c3e30c71be&hl=en
Since any page that hosts GA tracking code shows up in our content view, I could locate where the widget is being viewed by simply looking for all pages whose name did not include ourdomain.com. Of course this includes proxy servers as well, but I was going to also include a custom variable so I could implement a filter based on the custom variable.
So explain to me where this breaks down or what I'm missing here. Is there some amount of data I am losing here because the GA cookie is not in fact being utilized? Give me a good reason why I should put in the effort to fully implement cross domain tracking, including the necessary P3P implementation on our server for IE visitors.
As a sidenote, I am considering adding GA tracking code with an event tracker within the widget itself to track when people actually USE the widget (as distinct from the when the widget is loaded). I understand that by not implementing cross domain tracking I would not be able to obtain any data about the visitor, only whether the widget was acted upon or not.
As the referring site is the primary bit of information we need,
I'm going to pass the referrer in the URL that loads the iframe content
and then overide the referrer within the tracking code
_gaq.push(['_setReferrerOverride',ht_referrer]);
as documented here:
http://www.prusak.com/google-analytics-referrer-override/
This way, I don't need to inject tracking code into my widget, just some JavaScript that adds the referrer to the URL that loads the iframe.
Wish me luck.