Firing a tag on certain pages in Google Tag Manager

Question

I am trying to create a regexp to fire a tag within Google Tag Manager on certain pages. The issue I am having is that I do not want to fire this tag on URLs matching a querystring in them, since it is only a session identifier and I do not need the tag to fire on the pages that have a query string. These are basically duplicates and they do not need tracking in a 3rd party tracking program. I know how I could exclude them in GA, but I can't figure out how to do it for the third party tracking. I'll detail the scenario below and what I have tried. Example pages that come up in my URL report if I look in GA: /page /page/subpage?my-handsome-query-string&some-other-data /page/subpage /page/subpage/subsubpage /page/?query-string-again So what I want to do is to fire the tracking on pages that does NOT have the query string, and it is proving quite the issue. If I put in `^/page.*[^\?]` it just doesn't work. I guess I am completely using the negated character class all wrong? I can't get i…

Accepted Answer

You can actually create two rules as you described.

In GTM, tags can have both Firing rules and Blocking rules. Blocking takes precedence. eg.

Firing rule:

```
{{url}} matches ^page/.*
```

Blocking rule:

```
{{url}} does not contain ?
```

Another option is to use a custom javascript macro. It is in the form of a `function(){ }` which can detect a query string value in `window.location.search` and return boolean. Then have a firing rule `{{your custom fn}} equals 1`.

You can also create a macro which uses the `URL` macro type and `Query` component type. The value is set to the query string without the leading `?`. If the url was `example.com?foo=bar` this macro would contain `foo=bar`. Then simply add a firing rule `{{query}} matches Regex ^$` or `{{query}} does not contain something-that-will-never-be-in-the-url-to-avoid-regex`

Firing a tag on certain pages in Google Tag Manager

Solution

Problem