Will Hattman

If you’re like me, you long ago committed to using Google Tag Manager as your one and only platform for configuring your site’s event tracking (and — though it perhaps isn’t the optimal way to go about it — maybe your structured data markup too). To set this up in GTM, you had to create Custom JavaScript variables that used CSS or jQuery selectors to identify the correct elements on the page, and then create tags that arranged those variables into scripts that would pass data to Google Analytics, and/or to Google Search, in a comprehensible format. Those CSS or jQuery selectors were precisely tuned to the unique HTML of the pages where the tags needed to fire, relying on the signature attributes —like id or class — of the key elements in order to identify them. You might have had to go through a frustrating trial and error process to configure some of those variables so that they would populate correctly every time, on every page, but you got there.

And now you hear that the site is going to be redesigned from top to bottom, and the HTML signatures you relied on are all going to vanish or change. PANIC!

Google Tag Manager is top of the heap and still growing in popularity as a tag management solution, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be, given its ease of use, clean interface, and shall we say tempting retail price of $0.00. Despite the reservations I always feel when I find myself becoming dependent on a new Google product, I’ve quite liked the experience of using it, and one of the great strengths of that experience is how marvelously not buggy the platform is. Google Analytics, by contrast, has probably thwarted me with 20 or more crazy inexplicable bugs in my seven years’ experience using it (their issue tracker lists the total number of issues tracked as “many”), but GTM hasn’t even let one come to the surface that I’ve been aware of, and I’m not exactly new to GTM either at this point. The other day, however, our fearless leader brought to my attention something that sort of qualifies as a bug, and given that 1) lots of people are finding it frustrating, 2) I completely understand why, and 3) the fix is dead simple but also completely counterintuitive, I thought it would be worth taking a few minutes to outline a solution.

I’m talking about the error message that shows in the Chrome console or in Google Tag Assistant when you’ve placed code for a new container on a site, but have yet to publish the container. In the console, it reads: “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 404”, and it looks like this: