Variables in Google Tag Manager

[jorisbrabants]

Last week I got a great answer here on how to implement GTM and cross domain tracking, now that we have that in place I'm looking for some more advice

I'm wondering that if we push variabels into the data-layer of GTM, can we actually use those variables in reports as well? Do they get recorded in Google Analytics?

I'd like to use some data that we push to the data layer for segmentation purposes. Anybody an idea how to achieve this?

[jorisbrabants]

Thanks Martijn,

I'm looking at http://www.dbi.io/uk/how-to-segment-logged-in-users-using-google-analytics/ at the moment, I'll probably be able to set that variable when a certain pageview gets triggered.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Joris,

By default it won't. The variables in Google Tag Manager can be used by sending, like you've mentioned, information to the dataLayer. But they won't be used automatically to have information send to Google Analytics. What you can do is send the information to your dataLayer and then use the variables in setting up the tracking via Google Tag Manager to send the variables in custom dimensions to Google Analytics.

So let's say you're pushing something to the dataLayer, then you would create a variable based on that and use that information in the next set of tags that you'll be creating. So for example setting a custom dimension would be:

ga('set', 'customDimension10', '{{Category}}');