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Google Analytics Data Layer - is this code the only code I need to install on my site (other than my UA tracking code)

I'm trying to capture some data from an e-commerce session. The product name, price, etc will be ever-changing and the quantity, transaction ID and total amount will obviously differ for each purchase. My question, is the code below the ONLY code I need to install to use the data layer in conjunction with Google Analytics? The support on Google's site is difficult for me to understand, at first they say this is the code to install and then their next example shows the code with transaction ID, price, etc. I'm assuming that information is passed into the data layer as an array provided the code pasted below is installed exactly as I pasted it.

<script>
dataLayer = [];
</script>

<script>
  dataLayer = [];
</script>

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Randy Downs

That's an empty data layer so won't accomplish anything.

<script>
  dataLayer = [];
</script>

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The above snippet is an empty object that can be populated with information to pass to Google Tag Manager.

if you choose not to implement the data layer, you can still access values from the page using the the Macros feature, but you cannot use events without the data layer. Implementing the data layer with variables and associated values, as opposed to waiting for those variables to load throughout the page, ensures that they will be available as soon as you need them to fire tags.

Randy Cole

ASKER

Thanks Randy: if I want to pass data such as price and quantity into the data layer, will I need to hard code that into the data layer snippet or is it something that I can populate with Google Tag Manager?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Randy Downs

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