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How to Ensure Google Tag Manager Sends Your Events to Google Analytics

Creating events in Google Tag Manager seems pretty straightforward but if your events aren’t reporting in Google Analytics, check your configuration.

No matter what kind of website you have, you need insight into performance and how users interact with it. Collecting this kind of data is a must.

A web analytics tool like Google Analytics can help you understand the data behind the user experience of your website. A tag management tool, like Google Tag Manager,  enables you to customize your web analytics solution and capture more data.

Google Tag Manager allows you to collect data without heavy lifting on the development side. You can deploy all kinds of third-party–not just Google products–tags, or snippets, of code to enhance your data collection and web analytics solution. 

Once you’ve installed Google Tag Manager on your site, you can deploy Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager.

Creating Events in Google Tag Manager

Create a Google Analytics tag to track your event.

Test and QA with Google Tag Manager

Use the preview mode in Google Tag Manager.

Test and QA with Google Analytics

Use real-time reporting and check if the data reports in the default reports.

Check Google Tag Manager Configuration

If you dig into it, your web browser’s debugging tool will show errors for unknown and undefined parameters that prevent Google Analytics from running commands in the code and thus prevent the code from sending data to your Google Analytics account.  

The reason for this is that the person who created the event tag added a Google Analytics Settings variable into the Tracking ID field, either in the tag itself or the settings variable used in the tag.

The Tracking ID field can only accept a string of your Google Analytics tracking ID, “UA-XXXXX-Y” or a variable, either a constant or from a Lookup Table, that returns that string.

The Google Analytics Settings variable returns a configuration object instead of that Google Analytics tracking ID string. That’s what causes the errors. 

The most simple solution is to fix the Tracking ID field. That will enable the tag to fire correctly.