A Quick Guide to Bulk Actions in Google Tag Manager

Looks like the GTM feature wishlist is starting to become a reality. Woohoo! First, email notifications, then partial export, and now this.

Fresh from the oven. Google Tag Manager has introduced a feature I wanted for a long time, bulk actions. No more “delete one-by-one”, trying to solve this with Chrome plugins or APIs.

If you want to delete several items in the container, you can just click checkboxes next to them and then hit the delete button. It’s that simple.

P.S. bulk actions are not only related to deletion. Let me show you.

Where can you find them?

Bulk actions are available in the following lists:

• Tags
• Triggers
• Variables
• Templates
• Clients (they are in the server-side containers)

By default, they are hidden but you can quickly reveal them by having at least one checkbox clicked in the list.

What bulk actions are available in the GTM UI?

In total, there are three possible bulk actions:

• Pause (immediately pauses all selected tags BUT you still need to publish the container to have these changes live)
• Move to folder (previously, you could items to the folder only in the Folders section)
• Delete

But not all of them are available in every list within GTM:

• “Pause” and “Edit Triggers” is available only in the Tags list
• “Move to folder” is available in Tags, Triggers, Variables, Clients
• “Delete” is available in Tags, Triggers, Variables, Templates, Clients

Bulk edit of triggers

This is a very welcome update too. Every time I am working on someone else’s GTM setup and need to add GDPR-related triggers, the process is tedious (because there are many privacy-related blocking and firing trigger that must be added to tags). From now on, this is much easier to implement.

Just go to the list of tags, select all the tags to which you want to add (or remove) certain triggers, and then click the “Edit triggers” icon in the top right corner of the tag list.

Now you will see a list of all triggers that are used by those tags. If the checkbox is gray, it means that some of the tags have that trigger while others don’t.

If you click it, you will remove the trigger from all tags. If you click it again, then you will add that trigger to all the selected tags. Want to add an additional trigger or an exception to all the selected tags? Click the plus icon and select what you need.

After you’re done, save the changes and celebrate how much time you have just saved compared to the previous GTM experience.

Conflicts when you delete in bulk

If you are deleting some item that is used in another asset within the container (for example, a trigger that is used in another tag), Google Tag Manager will return a list of errors that you will need to resolve.

You have two options here:

• You can either close that window with the list of errors and then resolve every error
• Or you can click directly on the item that has an error, then fix the error (e.g. remove the trigger from a tag) and then go back to the list of errors and click the Retry button in the top right corner. The errors that have been resolved will be hidden.

In case you missed that

The feature that I’m about to show you has been around for quite some time but I still wanted to mention. Maybe some of my readers will hear about this for the first time.

You can add multiple triggers at the same time.

When you are in the tag and you click on the Triggering section, you’ll see a list of all triggers in your container. Now, hover your mouse on the trigger icon. It will change to the checkbox.

Now you can select multiple triggers and link them to a tag at the same time.

Some room for improvement

This is definitely a time saver but while playing with it, I started wanting one more thing: bulk copy/paste. Something similar to Google Ads.

I wish I could select certain items in my container, click Copy button, and then I’d like to go to another container and click Paste, CTRL + V, or CMD + V, and those items would be added there.

Yes, I understand that this is a much larger feature to develop than, for example, bulk pause, but this would definitely be a cool and useful improvement. While this is just a dream, we should continue using gtmtools.com, built-in partial export, or copy/paste Chrome extension to do the job.

Final words

This nice update will make my GTM audits a little faster. I didn’t have any issues with the bulk “move to folder” because that one was available in the Folders section. However, bulk delete and bulk pause are real time savers.

For example, you can go to the Triggers list and in that very same list, you can see how many triggers have 0 tags associated. Now, feel free to delete them with several clicks.

You can also identify which tags or variables are not used in Simo’s gtmtools.com. Once you do that, bulk delete (once again) becomes your best friend.