Hi Frederik,

Thanks for the heads up!

True, you can potentially do that. But for sending some simple requests you don’t even need the Google Tag Manager Injector or a different app.
Hopefully, people find more useful ways spending time instead of someone else’s stats! And I won’t go into further detail as I don’t want to encourage people trying this out.

Best,
Paul

Thanks for the in depth explanation, and your blog posts in general.

In theory, you would be able to send data, potentially skewing data collection, on domains you don’t own? Pageviews could be bumped, and the only thing preventing goal/event triggering is naming convention, which should be guessed?

Best,
Frederik

Hi, I am sorry but I don’t understand your question. Do you want to track a button on your website or another website? You can’t track a button on a different website, but you can track a button that refers to another website.

Thanks Ramon. Unfortunately it is only your data. Otherwise you could spy on other websites and collect their data in your view/account. :-)

Hi Bennett,

It always works on my end, sorry to hear it doesn’t work for you.

One reason I can come up with:
Did you insert the website with or without “http(s)//”? You should specify the root domain without “http(s)//”. Example: online-metrics.com (in my case).

PS: if it still doesn’t work you can send me an email: paul (at) online-metrics.com. And give me more details about your test.

Best,
Paul

I am having issues getting this to work. I’ve followed the steps listed above word for word and I am not seeing the Preview and Debug dialogue box pop up on the website I am attempting to test. I start the GTM in Preview/Debug mode, switch tabs to the website I want to test, plug in the GTM and website and when I click “start” the page refreshes yet the debug console never pops up at the bottom like it usually does. Tag Assistant sees that the faux GTM is now “installed” but it still does not pop up. Are there any FAQs involving issues for this? This tool would be perfect for what I do and I am desperately trying to get it to work.

Thanks a bunch!

Hi Chris,

Thanks for reaching out. Yes, exactly and you don’t even have to publish the container to get your data coming in. The beauty is that later on (after your potential client agreed) you can make a head start because you already prepared the tracking and can get it live soon. Tons of advantages!

PS: you can even test out dataLayer calls.

Best,
Paul

Great article. Just to check, this means I could set up a GA account and apply it to a GTM container and relevant domain which will then enable me to set up any tracking related to that domain? Similar to Pat, I have a couple of potential clients so being able to pitch with real in depth analytics for their website would be amazing.

Thanks,
Chris