Taking Your Tag Manager to a SPA

SPA stands for Single Page Application. It’s the proper term for a website (or part of a website) that have a fixed URL and dynamically updates as buttons are pressed etc. So these are sites where overlays and galleries open up in the same page without you having to wait for a whole new page to load.

These types of sites are becoming more common as they look quite snazzy and whizzbang. They can be a real issue for tag managers and analytics platforms though as these tools primarily rely on a new page being loaded with a different URL after each action.

To get around this you need to “announce” to the system that something has taken place. Different systems give these different names but the most common is “event tracking”. So you or your site team needs to trigger an event with the appropriate details such as name and type. Within you tag manager you can then set tags to fire in response to events of a given name and type.

There are ways to track button clicks in some systems but these can be a bit temperamental and unreliable depending on how the site and buttons works.