In this post I’ll give a very simple example of the new Trigger Groups feature in Google Tag Manager.

For a more substantial and thorough look at Trigger Groups check out;

• Trigger Groups blog post by Simo Ahava
• Trigger Groups video by Measureschool

But I’ll give you a very simple example – with doggos!

Let’s say we want to measure users on this blog post who engage with two pieces of content. The first is a video, and the second is a PDF. We can already track who watches the YouTube video and we can track who downloads the PDF. We want to to find out how many people watch both the video and download the PDF during their visit.

1. Watch this video about happy doggos

2. Download this PDF filled with pictures of happy doggos

Now that you’ve done that, we can measure in GTM.

How to create a Trigger Group in Google Tag Manager

The first step is to open up the Triggers section in Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Create a new trigger, and then choose Trigger Group as the Trigger Type.

We want to track YouTube video views and PDF downloads, so we can select those two as triggers.

I’ve also selected the trigger to only fire if the Page URL contains: how-to-create-trigger-groups-in-google-tag-manager.

We can then set up the GTM tag as shown below.

Set it up as a Google Analytics Event Tag. You can set up the details as whatever makes sense to you.

I’ve set it up as follows;

Category = Trigger Group
Action = View and Click
Label ={{Page URL}}

Then select your Google Analytics tracking code variable, and choose the Trigger Group we created earlier (in this case name ‘Doggo page trigger’.

Testing the tag using Google Tag Manager preview mode

The first step is to launch preview mode in GTM.

Once you’ve done that, you can open up your page to take a look at if the triggers are firing.

If we watch the video and click to download the PDF, we should see three tags that have fired.

The next step is to see if these tags are appearing in Google Analytics.

We can open Google Analytics and look at Real Time > Events.

We then click to watch the YouTube video and click to open the PDF in a new tab.

On my site I’ve already set up tags for YouTube video views and PDF views. So those are triggered and we can see our Trigger Group tag has also fired.

We can keep track of website events by creating an Event dashboard in Google Data Studio, as shown below.

Hope you found this useful!

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