When a user lands on a page, I want to show a custom HTML popup. I have Google Tag Manager integrated with the website.
Can this HTML Popup be shown using Google Tag Manager? (script and code to be inserted using Google Tag Manager)
Is it frowned upon / not advised to use google tag manager for
anything apart from tracking?
1.) Yes - GTM is pure Javascript, and inserts Javascript into the page code, so anything you can do you can do via GTM. There are some minor caveats (e.g. a size restriction on custom HTML tags), but doing a popup should work just fine.
2.) There are certain use cases that are discouraged - Google recommends against (or at least used to) making visible changes to the page markup via GTM. The problems with that are that GTM is loaded asynchronously, so you would not know at which point the changes show up and you might get "flickering" pages, and a possible performance impact when you force the page to re-render.
Nothing of this applies to popups, so you should be fine (although using popups these days might have its own problems, but these are not related to GTM).
Personally I would recommend against implementing popups via GTM if the popup is an integral part of your page; splitting up an application between page code and GTM code will sooner or later confuse a developer. But if this is just advertising or a call to action or something similar then (IMO) using GTM is not a problem at all.
Related
I have a client who wants a tag to fire on a thank you page but have users come from a form fill on a previous page. I've tried all types of set ups but none of them work 100 percent. The only thing I know is that the client site is a single page application which does not support the refer variable. The option that semi-worked leverages the history change trigger type however the client needs to track people who uniquely submitted the form fill page and made it to the thank you page.
The best option here would be adding a dataLayer.push to the successful form submission callback. That is, if the form is submitted via JS.
If it's just a standard (legacy) html form submission, then GTM has listeners for those. But they're rare, especially on SPAs.
If adding a dataLayer.push seems too complex, well then use the thank you page (with the history change) in conjunction with a short-lived cookie to prevent double firing, but it's a hack and not without bugs.
I am having some troubles with malicious ads that show interstitials with no close button.
Inspecting the code, I found that DFP uses <iframe> tags to load the ads, but as the content of those iframes are loaded using Javascript (using iframe's document.write(), without src attribute), they get full access to parent window through window.top and window.top.document, allowing advertisers to inject code, show malicious ads and even stole data such as user emails and passwords.
In order to prevent this, I'm looking for a way to block DFP ads to access the main window. Is it possible?
Consider using SafeFrames rather than Friendly Iframes you appear to be using. Quoting from DFP's help page on the subject:
We recommend using SafeFrames and creatives compatible with SafeFrame for expansion instead of friendly iframes. SafeFrame is supported in DFP and enabled by default when using GPT tags. It enables transparent and rich interactions between page content and ads, while preventing external access to sensitive data and providing more granular control over which creatives are rendered
I think you use synchronous rendering, try to change it to asynchronous
https://support.google.com/dfp_premium/answer/183282?hl=en
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 have been trying to get this to work for sometime and there seems to be very little information on how this works.
First, I would like to say that I tried the below method to get it working, so please read this before posting a solution.
What I tried:
I added the google analytics experiment code in a custom HTML block and had it fire only of the original page as stated by google. This doesn't work and seems to create a loop for users. A white page appears when users get to the experiment pages.
Does anyone know how to get this to work? Much appreciated
The Javascript versions of Google Content Experiments are not actually supported in GTM at the moment (they have do do either redirects or change the site on the fly and since it's hard to say in advance at which point during page load the tags fire, and it which order, this does not work very well - in the very best case the original page would load completely before the visitor is redirected to a variation).
The features page for GTM lists A/b testing tags as "coming soon" but does so since at least a year ago, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
However you can do variations serverside (you'd have to implement your own logic to display the proper variation to each users) and pass and experiment id and the variation number to GA via GTM. I do not think there is another (reliable) way to do this, at least not yet. If you need to do it with javascript you should add the experiment scripts to the page code instead of deploying them via tag managemement.
Having said that, there are descriptions for hacking around the GTM limitations using the Experiments Javascript API and some jQuery (here is one). When Google says that something is "not supported" it might just mean they didn't want to test all possible edge cases and err on the safe side. So you if you absolutely have to use GTM for Content Experiments you would have to test if something like this would work for you.
I hope that I understand your problem well. If yes, you can use Google Optimize instead of Google Experiment. The Google Optimize works with Google Tag Manager by default.
Here's what worked for me
For the pages in the Experiment, I implemented Google Analytics the "old fashioned way" with analytics.js instead of GTM.
I tested (with Realtime analytics) this and the Experiment page and the Google Tag Pages both report data.
I did post asking if there might be conflicts from ths.
It's possible to modify the Google Tag Manager (GTM) snippet to run synchronously by removing the j.async=true; line and placing it at the top of your page, immediately after the opening <head> element. Like so:
<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<script>(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':
new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],
j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.src=
'//www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);
})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-XXXX');</script>
<!-- End Google Tag Manager -->
You can also retain support for users without Javascript by inserting the <iframe> part of the code in the original location specified by GTM (after your opening <body> element).
<noscript><iframe src="//www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-XXXX"
height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden"></iframe</noscript>
It's then possible to insert the Google Analytics Experiments code as a Custom HTML tag in GTM. Just make sure you check the 'support document.write()' checkbox.
Just don't forget to update GTM-XXXX with your container ID.
I noticed that Google has released their Tag Manager application making it really easy to make changes to your tags and tracking options. How can I use this tool to track off site links?
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is not a tracking tool, so the short and unhelpful answer is that you can't. However you can deploy Google Analytics via GTM, which I guess is what you mean. I have to say, though, that tracking offsite links turned out a little less straightforward than I expected it to be.
Usually you track external links by virtual pageviews (or events). The usual way in GTM would be to push a variable to the data layer on the click event of the link and then fire a GA tag with a virtual pageview based on a rule based on that event. This failed completely for me when I tested it, presumably because the new page had loaded before the GA tag could fire. So I resorted to a not very elegant workaround:
First I created a standard Google Analytics Tag (tracking type pageview) to make sure the GA code was included in the site. Then I created a custom HMTL Tag with a bit of Javascript (this is assuming you use jQuery in your page):
<script>
$('a').click(function() {
var p = $(this).attr('href');
if (p.search(/.+YOUDOMAIN/) == -1){
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', "external://" + p]); // mark links as external in the GA interface
}
});
</script>
For all links that do not contain YOURDOMAIN a click event with a pageview is attached to the link. To make sure the all the links are tagged with the click event you set a rule in the tag manager to make sure the script is executed only after the page has loaded you set event based rule in the tag manager where the event is equal to gtm.load (gtm's equivalent of jQuerys domReady).
This works (at least it did in my tests), but since it does not use GTMs intermediary dataLayer it looks rather like a hack to me. If anybody can suggest a proper solution I'd be grateful.