GTM Events

 GTM Events

Now let’s talk about Google Tag Manager events. In order to see them enable GTM’s Preview and Debug mode by clicking the Preview button in the top right corner of Google Tag Manager interface.

After you enable Preview and Debug mode, it will be opened in a new tab and then your website will be loaded in a separate browser tab/window.

Once the preview mode is enabled, navigate to the preview mode’s tab (its URL will contains tagassistant.google.com) and you will see information about your tags, including their firing status and what data is being processed. If it does not work, read the guide explaining how to fix GTM preview mode.

On the left side of the Preview and Debug console, you should see a list of some definitions, e.g. Container Loaded, Window Loaded.These, my friend, are Google Tag Manager Events.

They actually play a very important role within GTM –  you can fire your Tags (scripts of various marketing tools) based on these Google Tag Manager events. Here are a few examples to make it easier to comprehend:

• Container Loaded Google Tag Manager Event can be used as a trigger to fire Google Analytics 4 Configuration tag.
• A Link Click occurs when a certain element with a link is clicked. For example, when someone clicks a PDF link on your website, you can send this click as a Google Analytics event (and see it in your reports). P.S. Out of the box, you won’t be seeing any events except Container Loaded, DOM Ready and Window Loaded. In order to start seeing events, you need to have at least one trigger of that type enabled in the container. Here’s an example of how to track link clicks and button clicks.
• A Form Submission GTM event (that happens when a visitor submits a form) can trigger another Google Analytics 4 Event Tag (that sends an event with the data of the submitted form to GA reports). Form Submission GTM event can also be used as a trigger to fire a Google Ads Conversion Tag (or any other tag you want – it’s up to your imagination). And don’t limit yourself just to these tags.
• Since all Google Tag Manager events are populated in Data Layer, you can also ask your developer to fire custom Google Tag Manager events (a.k.a. “Data Layer Events”).

To sum up, the Google Tag Manager event is an interaction on your website that is spotted by GTM and then placed in the Data Layer (p.s. Data Layer is automatically created on your website when GTM container code is implemented and published). That interaction on your website can be used as a trigger (condition) to fire your tracking tags (scripts), e.g. Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics Events, Mixpanel Events, Google Ads Tags, etc.

So as you can see, Google Tag Manager is the middleman in your Analytics implementation. It observes interactions that occur on your website, creates GTM events and then uses them to fire tags (e.g. Google Analytics Event). Although the term Event is the same in both Google products, in Google Tag Manager a GTM Event is a triggering condition, while GA Event is a Tag.