Hi everyone, I'm Krista Seiden,
Analytics Advocate at Google and today I'm joined
by Scott Herman who is a product manager
on Google Tag Manager. If you've ever had
to update a setting across many of your
tags in Google Tag Manager, or if
something changes and you have to go in and
check every one, you may have run into
the headache of there just being so many
tags in your account to update, or one maybe
slipping through and not getting that
update and then you're not in a very
good place when it comes to your
settings, right? So, in this quick tip
video Scott is going to walk us through
the new Centralized Google Analytics
Settings Variable in Google Tag Manager.
And this is something I know I'm super
excited about and I think you guys will
also be. So with that, I'm going to hand
it over to Scott. Great, thank you Krista.
So, as Krista says we we know that there
have been a lot of headaches over the
years when it comes to setting up
multiple tags that have to work together.
And I think the the best example of this,
or maybe worst example of this, is the
Google Analytics tags, which you know
your tagging on these tags really does
need to be consistent. Things like fields
to set, custom dimensions, tracking IDs,
need to be controlled consistently
across multiple tags that work together
across the pageview tag, across an event
tag, and so on. So, let's take a look at
how this is handled in the old version
of this tag, and then we'll show a bit of
how it's changing as of May 2017.
So, we'll take a look at the Google Tag
Manager interface, and you'll see here I
have a bunch of tags set up already.
A bunch of GA tags set up for events and
a standard page view tag, and we'll ignore
this last one until I get to that.
So, if you were going and entering a new
Google Analytics tag, I would go and I would
click new tag. My tag configuration here,
I'll select Universal Analytics.
Now the standard way to do this, of course, is to
enter in a tracking ID.
So I will do that here.
You know UA dash one two three four five dash one,
just the sample can tracking ID for my
Google Analytics property. And I'll note
that it's a track type of page view.
There's a lot of different traffic types
here of course. And anything else that I
want to set for this tag, such as fields
to set, like a cookie domain, I might type
in as Auto. And custom dimensions, I could
add a custom dimension here, index one.
And I don't know, let's say maybe page
hostname if I have that set up here.
Here it is. So, this will capture that
page hostname in the index one of my
Google Analytics custom dimensions.
And I could out a lot more settings here
but I won't bother with that at the
moment. Now, if I were to save this tag I
can do that.
GA test tag, just for fun.
It's fine without a trigger because I'm
not actually going to launch this tag.
And if I were to do that maybe ten times,
maybe fifty times, or a hundred times,
depending on how many tags I have,
if I then needed to go in and change my
tracking ID or add a new custom
dimension, as Krista was describing, that
could be a nightmare. Right? You'd have to
do that in a lot of different places and
make sure that it's done consistently.
People have used our API for this in the
past which is a great use of our API.
And there are some other workarounds. So if we
look at some of the tags that I've
already set up in here, you'll note that
here I'm using a variable for my
tracking ID. I'm using a variable for my
cookie domain value. And if I were to
click into this and take a look at,
you know, let's look at the GA Property
variable here, you'll see it's just a
constant string and I have a fake UA ID
here just for the purpose of this demo.
But, this is a way that if I wanted to I
could change this value here and it would
change it across all the tags that are
using this variable. But, of course this
is still not great because it's hard to
use. You need to know to do this. You
need to set it up that way in the first
place. So, what we're releasing as of May
twenty seventeen, is a new variable type called
Google Analytics Setting Variables.
And I'm going to switch to a
new tag type here called the Universal
Analytics Beta Tag. Now as of our public
launch you won't see this as a beta tag,
this will just be the new norm within
your Universal Analytics tags. But to
show you the difference between our
previous functionality and this new
functionality I'm in a different
environment here with our beta tag.
So, we'll create a beta tag. The first thing
it's going to ask me is the track type
instead of my tracking ID like it had
done previously. And I think that this is
more in line with the way that people
tend to think about how they're doing
tagging. You know you might say, I want to
launch a new Google Analytics page view
tag or event tag. Oftentimes when you're
adding tagging you're not immediately
thinking of the tracking ID that you
want to use. So, here I can select an
event, I can select the page view. We'll
leave it as page view and what you'll
see here is somewhat new. If you're
coming into this for the first time
after this this Google Analytics
Settings Variable release,
I do encourage you if you're not sure
of any of these features we have these
info tips here where you can learn more
and click out to our Help Center. But,
basically it's asking me to select the
settings variable. And you'll notice that
there's nothing in here except the
prompt to create a new variable. Now, if I
had already created a Google Analytics
Settings Variable, that would show up here.
It's going to be limited to
only those variables that make sense.
You're not going to be able to choose
some custom JavaScript variable here
where it wouldn't actually work.
So, I'll create a new variable, and this will load
a new slider for me. Now here I can enter
my tracking ID.
And I can enter in my cookie domain and you'll notice
that we've actually raised the cookie domain
field up to the highest level. This is
because previously Google Tag Manager,
the Google Analytics tags within it, did
not have this cookie domain set to auto
by default. But all of the tracking code
that you would get out of Google
Analytics, out of the public
documentation, did include that cookie
domain as auto by default. So, we are now
making that change. There is again a nice
info tip here which explains
that change and what you might
need to think about related to that change.
So, I do encourage you to take a
look at that and make sure that this
setting works for your organization.
And any of the other settings here like
custom dimensions, you know the same thing
holds here we would do the same thing
that we did before and choose maybe the
page hostname, just as a an example.
There's no triggering here. There's
no tag firing priority or anything
because this is a variable. And I will
name this variable Standard GA Settings.
You can name it whatever you want.
I encourage you to name it something that
will make sense to any of the other
users who are doing Google Analytics
tagging in the container. And I will save this.
And now you'll notice it's selected
here for me. And the next person who comes in,
or if I go to create a new tag, this will
show up in this drop-down, so I don't
need to create a new one every time.
If you want to see what's in it you can
click this little info button and this
will bring me back into that that
summary of that tag. And of course you
know a question might be first of all,
well what if I have a settings variable
for a hundred different tags, and I want to
change a custom dimension or change the
tracking ID and only one of those, right?
Well, no problem at all. You can click
this 'Enable overriding settings in this
tag' checkbox. And now you'll see my
tracking ID is available down here.
As well as all the other settings. And you
can see it says is inherited from the
settings variable. So, all of the settings
are still being pulled from that
settings variable, but you can override
them one by one if you'd like to. So, in
this case maybe I'll say, well actually
let's send the data to one two three four five dash two.
Now all the other settings, like
the Custom Dimension, the field to set the
cookie domain, are still going to apply here.
So, that's generally the gist
of this feature. What I would say, as well
is, that you can create as many of these
settings variables as you'd like. So, if
you have a container that spans multiple
websites, or you have a Google at
multiple Google Analytics properties
that you're working with, you can set up
more of these settings variables and
ultimately they should help
you manage things across lots of
containers, add additional custom
dimensions without all this hassle and
all these workarounds that we've talked
about. So, we're really excited to be
releasing this feature. Great, thanks Scott.
I'm super excited for this
because I know I've personally felt the
pain of having to update many tags as
I'm sure many of you have as well. So,
hopefully you guys will try out the new
Settings variable when it comes out.
And hopefully it makes your lives that
much better! Thank you.