
On March 10th 2025, many of us received an email from Google regarding an upcoming update in Google Tag Manager:
This has caused confusions for many people. In this article, we will explain exactly what the update actually means.
Google tag is a single piece of code that you can find in Google Ads, Google Analytics, and other similar Google products. Google Tag is a prerequisite for sending events to Google services, thus it must be loaded on the website (via GTM or gtag.js).
For example:
When an event fires and there is no corresponding Google Tag pre-loaded, which can happen in conditions such as:
GTM will try to fix this for you by automatically loading a Google Tag that corresponds to your event. However, most of the Google Tag's settings (eg. enhanced measurement, user-provided data) will be toggled off by default.
Flow:
To improve data quality, Google will be making a change in the way GTM auto loads the Google Tag for Google Ads and Floodlight tags.
Updated flows:
You have two options:
OR
That way, you have full control over what happens in GTM and prevent the auto loading behavior which can be difficult to diagnose.