The analytics team here at Found have been enjoying the small but impactful releases Google had been rolling out this autumn. Aside from the big announcement of 2020 – server-side tagging – the things that have got us excited and literally made our lives easier have been the partial exports (hurrah for reusability) and bulk actions (amazing for time-saving).
Partial exports.
Previously used as a back-up or a way to distribute useful repositories, the export function has all of a sudden become so much more useful! Going from an all-or-nothing paradigm to export any subset has made a huge difference in the ways this feature can be used. For example, here at Found we use a set of helper tags to allow for easy addition of GA events and with this feature, we don’t have to recreate them in every container or do complicated JSON pruning for an entire container export to extract them.
How they work:
In the usual place for the export functionality : Admin -> Container -> Export container you now get a picklist of all tags after selecting the container version/workspace you want to download. In our case, should we simply want to download some helper Javascript tags, this becomes super easy like so:
One super useful feature is the dependency warning – if you choose to export tags without their associated variables or triggers, you automatically get a warning, so you can ensure you are considering all elements of the export and you don’t end up with a job half done. Pretty neat.
Bulk actions.
Every GTM light or pro user has at some point suffered from the pain of having to review a container, find upwards of 20 tags/variables/triggers that were obsolete and had to make a cup of coffee, resign to the task ahead, then proceed to delete all of them one by one – waiting for the page to refresh every time, clicking confirmation buttons and frankly wasting a good chunk of time unnecessarily. Such was life before bulk actions – small release, but what an impact this is having!
The magic of adding check-boxes against the lists is a serious time-saver:
You can now select the tags you need (tags are pictured in this example but the interface is the same for variables or triggers, clients, zones, templates) and then choose to perform bulk actions.
Bulk actions available:
- Tags: Delete, Pause/Unpause, Move to Folder
- Triggers: Delete, Move to Folder
- Variables: Delete, Move to Folder
- Clients: Delete, Move to Folder
- Zones: Delete
- Templates: Delete
Trying to delete items that have references will result in a warning, just as in the individual deletion process.
In summary – the team has got back a big chunk of their time, which they are now using to write blog-posts, so watch this space!
Jokes aside, we’re thrilled to see such a popular tool that is crucial in deploying tracking solutions for our clients get incrementally better and help us get even more efficient in our roles. We’re definitely excited to see what the next quarter brings.
