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Method

What a guide has to prove before it ships

A tracking guide is a claim about what happens when someone clicks. This site treats it that way.

What every guide carries

  • The documentation, opened. Every click path and field name is traced to a Google help or developer page that was opened and read on the date printed on the guide. The Sources section links each one by title.
  • The file, not a screenshot. Where a guide builds something — a container, an event reference — the file downloads from the guide page, so there is nothing to retype.
  • The expected signal. Each step says what you should see when it works: which list the tag appears under, which stream the event lands in, which report shows it first.
  • The limit, stated. Steps that need a Google account are marked as such. Nothing on this site pretends a signed-in product was run when it was not.

How the files are verified

Container exports are validated before they ship. The JSON must parse, the export format version must be 2, every tag's firing trigger must resolve to a trigger in the file or to a documented built-in trigger ID, every variable a tag references must exist in the file, and tag types must be the ones Google documents for the job — googtag for the Google tag, gaawe for a GA4 event tag. Numbers in worked examples are recomputed independently: the example purchase in the debugging guide totals $72.05 because 10.01 × 3 plus 21.01 × 2 is 72.05, and that arithmetic was run in Python before the guide was written.

What was not run

No guide on this site was run inside a live Google Analytics property or a live Tag Manager container, because both need a Google sign-in and this site does not sign in as anyone. The GA4 demo account was not used either, for the same reason. The click paths in the guides are the ones Google's help pages describe, opened 11 November 2026, and the container files are hand-built import templates validated structurally — they were not exported from a live container. If Google moves a menu item, the guide names the page it was traced to, so the reader can find the new location.

Version gates

Google changes its interfaces without warning. Every guide prints the date its documentation was opened and the rule that follows from it — for example, standard GA4 reports can take 24 to 48 hours to process data, so a same-day check belongs in Realtime or DebugView. When a guide's documentation goes stale, the guide is corrected and re-dated rather than left to drift.