Introducing Tagtician (Beta): The Tag Management Companion

I’d like for you all to formally meet your first and last tag management companion tool for DTM: Tagtician. I’ve been talking about it for the past few months… now use it. We’re pleased to announce our open beta launches today. So… if you haven’t been keeping up, what exactly is it? Tagtician is a DTM debugger at its core. Where other debuggers look for tags, Tagtician debugs rules.

Why debug rules? When you’re missing data, you already know a tag isn’t firing. Let’s skip the step of checking for the tag and instead go straight to the rule where the tag lives by browsing Tagtician’s library view:

DTM Rule in Tagtician

Looks like we’re missing more than just a single tag! The best part is we discovered this without dredging through pages of rules. See where we’re going with this?

Alright, that was an easy one. Our marketing department partners with dozens of vendors. You know this because your coworkers are swimming in free food and swag that they send over. You would stop by and grab those free cookies if you weren’t so busy micromanaging their cookies that live on your site. If I could only track down those retargeting pixels! Let’s check Tagtician:

Tagtician Rule Search

Found them! Now I can quickly go into DTM and make the change. Tagtician gives you more free time… and free time = free cookies.

We’re just scratching the surface. Use our debugger to figure out exactly when rules are firing, peek in on your tags and third party scripts, swap between your staging and production library… go crazy.

Where do we go from here? Our top priority is to squash any bugs you find in the extension. Past that, we’re listening to your feedback and will start working on some features that may not have made it in the first beta release, such as (but not limited to):

  • Rule exporting
  • “Full” debugging (includes all DTM console logs)
  • Analytics tool information
  • Debug log recording

We’ll also work to enhance our current feature set. As though that wasn’t enough, we’re working hard to bring you our next unannounced product. Keep posted for more information – and head to the Chrome store and download our beta of the Tagtician Chrome extension.

FAQ’s:

I see the icon at the top of my browser, but how do I access the Tagtician interface?

Open up developer tools by clicking the menu > More Tools… > Developer Tools. You’ll see the Tagtician tab there.

Will this be available in other browsers?

Not at this time. We’re a very small team of practitioners who are passionate about tag management. That said, we want to bring you the best tool on the best medium. To us, that medium is Chrome’s DevTools. Bringing a similar tool to another browser greatly increases the amount of testing and maintenance of the tool… and it’s free, so…

Do you plan to charge for the Tagtician Chrome extension after beta?

No. It will be free after beta.

Why is it called Tagtician?

As an analyst, tagging takes an adept tactician. Tagtician is a tool that is aimed at improving your ability to be a better tagging tactician… or to put it together – a tagtician.

How do I submit feedback or ideas?

Email me. We’re listening. I respond to EVERY email and feedback is greatly appreciated. In some (rare) cases, we will roll out a fix within minutes of your inquiry.

4 thoughts on “Introducing Tagtician (Beta): The Tag Management Companion”

  1. Hi All,
    Thanks for the wonderful plugin.

    Am using tagtician “Build Date: Wednesday, Feb 1, 2017, 7:28 PM GMT+5:30”.
    Am able to view rule that are firing on page load but not its details, when i click on rule its showing blank (unchecked view library).

    this is happening for direct rule too, if I try to export only headers are available in csv without data but for some rule it give data, specially if i click on view library i could see rule and its details too.

    please let me know why this is happening and guide me.

    Reply
    • Thanks for the feedback, Pradeep! It sounds like there might be a special character that needs to be escaped. I’ll take a look this evening. It could be a simple fix. Are you able to share a URL on which I can test this?

      Reply
      • Hi thanks, I appreciate your work and commitment, i was doing a testing on adobe.com now for adobe.com it got fixed, am trying to introduce tagtician plugin to the team i work with so that my colleagues can use its feature and capability. good luck

        Reply
        • That’s great news, Pradeep! I’ve experienced the tool being finnicky before but I cannot reproduce the “blank drawer” errors. If you find a way to reproduce it let me know and I’ll try my best to diagnose/fix it!

          Reply

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