There are situations when you need to submit some data about visits to Google Analytics, but for one reason or another, it cannot be transferred by standard way. For example: some traffic comes to your from the website, which does not pass parameters, such as: utm_campaign, utm_medium, utm_source and others that you would like to track, since you placed link there with quite specific purpose and want to understand further if your approach works or not.
In my case, the subscriptions service was sending emails, where my links were replaced by redirects through domain of this service and parameters in the address bar were not supported. Service just replaced everything by it’s own parameter with the encrypted key, which I couldn’t decrypt. It’s very intersting thing – internal stats of the service, of course. But I would like to keep track of everything in one place, in this case – in Google Analytics. And here this wonderful tool, Google Tag Manager, helped.
To set the trigger in the GTM was not a big problem – parameter of the service in the address bar, or the presence of certain fields in the cookies worked well. But what about method – how to convert this information into appropriate for tracking in Google Analytics? That’s the question, solution to which is given below.
In the tag of Universal Analytics type there is such tab as More, and another onw inside – Fields to set.
It is precisely the Fields to set tab lets you specify Universal Analytics fields directly, full range of which you can find in the Analytics.js Field Reference.
It is enough to find the desired parameter:
And then add it to the tag in the Google Tag Manager:
As you can see from the example – dropdown list already contains all the possible options for the field names, so you don’t need to run in a directory with documentation every time in order not to make a mistake in spelling. It will be enough just to remember what for the field is used.
The values of the fields you can set statically, or use variables through JavaScript or using other types of variables in the Google Tag Manager.
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