GTM4WP – A Google Tag Manager (GTM) plugin for WordPress

Content & engagement data

Optional page variables that help with behavior tracking and Google Analytics 4 content grouping:

• content word count and estimated reading time
• last modified date and content age in days
• comment count and comment status
• page template, featured image presence, page hierarchy and sticky flag
• primary category, detected from Yoast SEO or Rank Math
• page language, detected from WPML or Polylang

Browser / OS / Device data

• browser data (name, version, engine)
• OS data (name, version)
• device data (type, manufacturer, model)

Data is collected in the browser using User-Agent Client Hints and pushed as a gtm4wp.deviceData event. Note that Safari and Firefox expose less detail than Chromium based browsers.

Media player events

Track users’ interactions with any embedded media:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Soundcloud
• HTML5 audio and video
• Dailymotion
• Mixcloud
• Cloudflare Stream
• Wistia
• JW Player
• VideoPress
• Spotify
• Twitch

You can choose to fire data layer events when the media player loads, when the media is played, when it is paused or stopped, and optionally when the user reaches 10, 20, 30, …, 90, 100% of the media duration. Each event also populates Google Tag Manager’s built-in Video variables (Video Status, Video URL, Video Title, Video Provider, Video Duration, Video Current Time, Video Percent, Video Visible).

Tracking is supported for embedded media using the built-in oEmbed feature of WordPress, as well as most other media plugins and copy/pasted embed codes. Players inserted into the page after it has loaded (for example in a popup, a lightbox or via AJAX) can also be tracked by turning on the optional “Track dynamically inserted players” setting.

Tag restrictions: allowlist & blocklist Tag Manager tags, triggers and variables

To increase website security, you have the option to allowlist or blocklist tags, triggers and variables. You can prevent specific tags from firing, or prevent the use of certain variable types, regardless of your GTM setup.

If the Google account associated with your GTM account is compromised, an attacker could easily execute malware on your website without accessing its code on your hosting server. By blocklisting custom HTML tags, custom JavaScript variables and sandboxed scripts (custom tag and variable templates), you can secure the Tag Manager container.

Integration

Google Tag Manager for WordPress integrates with several popular plugins. More integrations to come!

• Contact Form 7: fire an event when a form is submitted with any result (mail sent, mail failed, spam detected, invalid input, submission aborted or terms not accepted). Optionally push the Google Analytics 4 recommended form events (form_start, form_submit, generate_lead) as well
• WooCommerce: Implementation of GA4 E-commerce
• Support for the Cart, Checkout, Mini-Cart, Product Collection and cross-sell blocks, not only the classic shortcode based pages
• Enhanced Conversions user data on the purchase event for Google Ads
• Compatibility with High Performance Order Storage (HPOS)
• Does not support promotions, since WooCommerce does not have such a feature (yet)
• Does not support refunds

CheckoutWC: optional support for its multi step checkout template PublishPress Authors: co-author and guest author data in the page variables AMP: load your AMP container on the AMP version of your pages Google Consent Mode v2: fire the “default” command with specific consent flags to integrate with non-certified Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) and plugins Cookiebot: use automatic cookie blocking mode if needed Axeptio: load the Axeptio SDK and push every consent change into the data layer CookieYes: push a data layer event whenever the visitor’s consent changes

Server side containers

If you are using a server side container , you can enter your custom domain name and custom path to load gtm.js from there. Both can be set per container, so you can mix server side and standard containers on the same site.

Cache-safe data layer

(experimental, off by default)

On sites using a full page cache (LiteSpeed, WP Rocket, Varnish, Cloudflare APO), the HTML generated for one visitor is served to everyone else as well. Any visitor specific value written into the data layer would therefore leak to other visitors – the classic example being a page cached while an editor was logged in, then served to anonymous visitors with that editor’s email address and role still in the data layer.

When this option is enabled, no visitor or session data is written into cacheable HTML at all. Those values are delivered in the browser instead, under the same data layer variable names, so your existing Google Tag Manager setup keeps working.

Export & import your settings

You can export all plugin settings into a JSON file and import them on another site, which makes it easy to roll out the same configuration across several websites. Imported files are treated as untrusted and every value is validated before it is stored.

Exclude specific user roles from being tracked

You can set which user roles need to be excluded from tracking when a user with that role visits the frontend. This will completely disable the container code for that user.

Staging and development sites

The container can be limited to production environments only, so a cloned or staging copy of your site does not send data into your production Google Tag Manager container. This relies on the WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE setting of WordPress.

For developers

Version 2.0 is a complete object oriented rewrite. Every feature is a module, and third party plugins can register their own modules through the gtm4wp_register_modules action. All public template functions, filter and action names, wp-config constants and the option storage key of the 1.x versions are unchanged, so existing integrations keep working.