If you have done anything with Google Tag Manager, you probably already know three key concepts: tags, triggers, and variables. But, actually, you should know there is one more key ingredient, the Data Layer. Google Tag Manager walks hand in hand with the Data Layer which ensures maximum flexibility, portability, and ease of implementation. Without it, there would be no variables and no triggers in GTM, therefore no tags would be fired. It is what keeps your tag management running properly.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to dive into what the Data Layer is because that’s a whole another story. In today’s blog post, I’ll take a look at what the Data Layer Variable is.

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Several weeks ago, I noticed a question in GTM Google+ community asking if it’s possible to track when a particular website element is visible on the screen. There were several hints offered but no ready-made solution for non-developers like you (probably) and me. So today, I’m going to show you a custom listener which will track particular website elements (you’ll have to configure it) and fire a dataLayer.push event when that element/section comes into the browser window view.

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Google Tag Manager is awesome and I cannot imagine a work day without it. It lets me, as a non-developer, manage tracking codes, control simple and complex rules, and much more. What if my colleague wants to start tracking a particular form? Easy! Need to implement a heat map tracking tool? No problem! And the best part, I don’t have to wait several weeks when a developer becomes available.

Want something even better? The reasons I mentioned above are not the only ones. In fact, I know at least 10 more why you should use GTM. In this blog post, I’ll show you the benefits of Google Tag Manager and you’ll find the list really useful if:

• You are new to Google Tag Manager and want to know if it’s a right fit for you.
• Or you need to convince someone else to start using GTM.

Ready? Let’s go.

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Obviously, social interactions that occur on your website indicate a high level of user engagement, so there is no doubt that we need to track social interactions. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to monitor them thanks to Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.

Likes, tweets, etc. are already demystified in my other blog post, How To Track Social Interactions with GTM, but lately, I have received a question from a reader asking What about Facebook Comments? 

At first, I wanted to answer No, comments are not supported. But moments later, I thought Maybe that shouldn’t be difficult? Turns out tracking Facebook Comments with GA is piece of cake.

In this blog post, I’ll show you how to track Facebook Comments with Google Tag Manager and automatically send that data to Google Analytics as Social Interactions.

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I’ll repeat myself once again. Auto-event listeners are one of the key concepts in Google Tag Manager. Just like a trigger, variable, tag, or data layer. In fact, more than half of my Google Tag Manager blog posts mention auto-event listeners one way or another.

Auto-event listeners are these super useful JavaScript functions which track particular interactions on a web page. In case something noteworthy occurs, they fire Data Layer events which can be used as triggers in GTM. Furthermore, those events contain valuable data which can be transferred to other tools, like Google Analytics, Adwords, Mixpanel, you name it.

There are a bunch of default GTM auto-event listeners (like Form submission, Timer, Pageview, etc.) and a lot more custom auto-event listeners available online (like Youtube, Scroll Tracking, Form abandonment, all available at the Library of GTM Recipes).

Unfortunately, these auto-event listeners do not cover all possible situations and don’t fulfill ALL our needs. What should we do then? The best option would be to ask developer’s help. But from my experience, they’re always busy with their deadlines and a bunch of queued tasks. What if we could write an auto-event listener ourselves (even though we have almost no coding skills)?

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