Kent's BlogSpot

Site Landing Page & Site Referrer to Cookies in Google Tag Manager — A Complete Recipe Without Custom JavaScript Persist the user's landing page host, landing page path, and referral source into session or long-lived persistent cookies using only GTM sandboxed Custom Templates. No Custom HTML tags. No new CSP hashes. Published · Tags: GTM, Google Analytics 4, Cookies, Site Referrer, Landing Page, First-Touch Attribution, User Journey, dataLayer, CSP, GA4 Where did this user first land on your site — and what referred them there? Those two pieces of information are foundational to understanding any user journey. But they only exist at the moment of the first page load. Navigate to a second page, return in a new browser session, or submit a form three days after the original visit, and the browser's native referrer is gone and the landing URL has long since changed. Without a persistence layer, you are flying blind. This recipe solves that problem cleanly...

UTM & URL Query String to Cookies in Google Tag Manager — A Complete Recipe Without Custom JavaScript Persist any URL query string parameter — UTM values, click IDs, or custom campaign codes — into session or long-lived persistent cookies using only GTM sandboxed Custom Templates. No Custom HTML tags. No new CSP hashes. Published · Tags: GTM, Google Analytics 4, UTM, Cookies, Query String, dataLayer, CSP, GA4, First-Touch Attribution, Lead Attribution UTM parameters tell you exactly how a visitor arrived at your site. But they only exist in the URL on the landing page. The moment a user navigates to a second page, clicks an internal link, or returns to the site in the same browser session, those parameters vanish from the address bar. If your marketing team needs to know which campaign drove a lead form submission that happened three days after the original visit — a common scenario in B2B with longer consideration cycles — you cannot read the UTMs from the URL. ...

Browser Viewport Measurement in Google Tag Manager — A Complete Recipe Without Custom JavaScript Send the user's current browser viewport dimensions as an event-level parameter on every GA4 hit — using only GTM's built-in JavaScript Variable type and a Constant. No Custom HTML tags. No new CSP hashes. Published · Tags: GTM, Google Analytics 4, Browser Viewport, Window Size, JavaScript Variable, CSP, GA4, Shared Event Settings How big is the browser window when a user converts? Does your checkout funnel drop off more on narrow viewports than wide ones? These questions sound like they should be answerable from GA4's built-in device category dimension — but device category is derived from the User-Agent string and tells you nothing about how much screen space the browser is actually using. A desktop user with a browser snapped to half-screen is classified as "desktop" even though their experience is closer to a narrow tablet. This recipe measures ...

Page View Counter in GA4 via GTM — Session & User-Level Counting Without CSP SHA-256 Count how many pages a visitor has seen — within a session or across multiple visits — using GTM Custom Templates that write cookies and push events to the dataLayer, with no inline JavaScript and no Content Security Policy headaches. Published · Tags: GTM, Google Analytics 4, Page View Counter, Cookies, dataLayer, Custom Event Trigger, CSP, SPA, History Change Note: This GTM container recipe is designed to work on Google Blogger / Blogspot as well as AEM, Sitecore, WordPress, React.js, and other platforms. A key design decision — using the page hostname instead of a computed root domain — is documented where it matters. The JSON can be downloaded from Google Drive below. Knowing how many pages a visitor has viewed — either within the current browser session or accumulated over multiple visits — opens up powerful segmentation and trigger logic in GA4. You can fire different...