Google is rebuilding Tag Manager. Before you click update, check three things.

What Google announced on 20 August

In the Tag Manager announcements Google described how the Google tag and Tag Manager are growing together. Setting up the Google tag and managing it in Tag Manager will live in one interface. The overview page is new and shows only the essentials, the advanced functions sit in a collapsed area. There is a new section for the container’s settings.

Then there is visual tagging: you click an element of your website, say the order button. Google turns it into an event or an order for Google Ads. It starts as a test phase for orders in Google Ads.

The most important sentence is a little hidden: the switch is voluntary. Google changes nothing in existing containers on its own. Your container keeps running like yesterday until someone in your account adopts the new setup.

Why this matters to you

Most containers have grown over years. An agency made the start, an app added something, an intern copied a tag. Hardly anyone still knows why which tag fires when. In a container like that a cleaned-up interface is tempting. It is also the moment when the most breaks, because tidying up removes things that were working quietly.

The second temptation is the click. If you can create an order with one click on the button, someone will do it. Next to the purchase event that already exists.

Check one: does the cookie banner run before the tags?

The order decides. First the container has to know what the visitor said in the cookie banner, then the tags may fire. If the cookie banner sets its signal only after the Google tag, the tags briefly send without consent and the numbers in the ad account do not match what you promise your visitors.

In new setups Google recommends a dedicated initialisation trigger instead of the old configuration command. That makes sense, but it shifts the order. After every change check both: a visit where you decline in the banner and one where you accept. In the first case only the tags that are allowed without consent may send. How the interplay is meant to work is in the Consent Mode guide.

Check two: does the order now exist twice?

Open the list of conversion actions in Google Ads. If two entries for the order sit there after the switch, Google counts every order twice. That looks great for two weeks, then Google distributes the budget by numbers that do not exist.

That is exactly what happens when visual tagging creates an order even though the purchase event already arrives through Tag Manager, a shop app or the server. Only one conversion action for the order may count as primary. Set all others to secondary or delete them.

For Shopify shops there is an extra limit: Tag Manager does not run in the checkout or on the thank-you page. A click on the order button in visual tagging measures nothing there. The order comes from the Customer events area or from the server, as has been necessary since 26 August anyway.

Check three: who owns the container?

Before any rebuild the container belongs in your Google account, with you as administrator. If it sits in an agency’s account, you cannot go back after the switch when something is wrong. Versions and notes in Tag Manager are your backup. Create and name a version before switching, then you can go back in a minute.

The same goes for the value a purchase reports. Amount, currency and order number come from your shop, not from a click on an element. Visual tagging can trigger an event. It cannot know how much the order was worth. Without the amount, Google Ads optimises for count instead of revenue.

What you can do now

• Do not click update before a named version of the container exists and you know which tags are responsible for the order.
• After the switch check two visits, one declined and one accepted. Then confirm in the ad account that there is only one primary conversion action for the order.
• Pass amount, currency and order number from the shop, not from the click.
• If you do not know what hangs in your container: the tracking check lists every route on which an order is reported and tells you which of them is a duplicate. After that you know what to carry over in the switch and what can go.