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:
