Yes, that sounds right to me! : )

I already have a tracking tag on the site (not implemented with GTM). So I set the tracking type from Page View to Event (to avoid track twice) and no interaction hit to "true". Did I do it right? I'm setting up custom dimensions to create remarketing audiences

I see, I'm glad you resolved it. Thanks for the update!

Thanks for the pointers. We've fixed this issue by overwriting GA settings and adding the custom dimension to all of our tags, in stead of just the GA tag.

It sounds like you may have a race condition, where the variable isn't reliably populated in time. This can happen if your variable is being done through a custom JS variable instead of being pushed in via the data layer, or if it's not getting populated until the second page view.

Another possibility is there's an error in the code, that is less likely though.

Can you do some investigating to find common threads among the 15% that isn't set? For example, are they on mobile, are they single-page visits, any specific browser? And can you make sure your logged in status is being pushed in through the data layer rather than through scraping the status into a custom JS var?

After adding a custom dimension for login status we're seeing the proper results in Analytics. The only issue we have is that with maybe 15% of our visitors the custom dimension is simply not set. Which is strange, because we set the dimension with every pageview. The only hint we have is that all of these users also trigger other kinds of events, for example when they hover over our menu, or submit a form. What could be causing this?

Jon

Hey Luca, what you're talking about is called DOM scraping. GTM has some built-in listeners for this, for example Click Text, if you want to track what someone clicked on. If you want to track elements of the page like titles and headers, you usually need to create custom JS variables that pull in the text you're looking for. You need to have some basic JS knowledge to do this, or if you know about CSS selectors you can modify this simple example script and include it in a custom JS var:
function (){
var entryTitle = document.querySelector(".entry-title").innerText;
return entryTitle;
}

You can see some more example scripts here: https://mixedanalytics.com/blog/useful-custom-js-variables-google-tag-manager/. Once you have your custom JS variable, you attach it to the custom dimension field in a page view or event tag, just like you would any other dimension.

Hope that helps point you in the right direction.

Hey Jason! It would need to be a custom event that fires on every page. That’s why my GTM event name is “pageview”, it’s an event that fires on every page view. You would set this event key at the same time you’re pushing your custom dimensions into the data layer.

In your case, where you’re pushing a data layer only on certain pages, this approach won’t work. Can you push your data layer key on every page, and just leave the values as null for those content types you don’t want to populate? If not, you’ll have to use the native All Pages trigger, and double check that your data layer values are ready when that All Pages trigger fires.

Very clear article! However, one thing I don't really understand:
In step 5 you add a trigger to the GA Page view tag. Normally I would use the All pages trigger, but you advise not to use this. So I tried your option with the custom event trigger. But now the GA tag only gets triggered when there is actually a custom event on the page. But this is not always the case. If a dataLayer is only filled with that custom event on certain pages (certain content in my case), then on other pages the GA tag is not triggered anymore and GA does not track anything.

What am I missing here?

Thanks for your reply!
Jason