Resetting Data Layer variables in Single page Applications ( Google Tag manager)

Question

Trying to achieve content grouping in mobile site which is SPA.

The scenario goes like this: When I am visiting a PDP page for the first time, category variable is set and this is sent to content groups in Universal Analytics Tag. If after this I go back to the homepage, the category variable doesn't update and homepage is also grouped under the same content group of previous PDP page.

This variable only updates when I visit another PDP page.

I am using a custom event PageLoad to mimic the pageView event. Just want the data layer varaibles to refresh within the consecutive PageLoad event.

Thanks

Yes thats what I am looking for .... but not sure how to do it. Can this be done via firing a Tag through GTM using dataLayer.push — Pranay, May 01 '17 at 10:03
Yes, it can be done with custom HTML tag. But it is much better to push data to dataLayer from backend. — mrbubu, May 03 '17 at 18:51

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '20 at 22:54

5

There is now a documented way to reset the data layer. See Reset in the Data layer docs.

If you push a function to the dataLayer, it'll give you access to an object with get, set, and reset semantics. For this question in particular, reset is the relevant bit.

answered Jul 06 '20 at 22:54

Matt Hamrick

759
5
10

I have to say, this is more than perfect. It amazing, thanks for this. This is specially useful when dealing with many variables – jtomasrl Mar 04 '21 at 12:07

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 28 '18 at 06:57

If the reset() doesn't work for you, maybe you want to try the following code

const boomDataLayer = () => {
  if (window.dataLayer !== undefined && window.google_tag_manager !== undefined) {
    window.dataLayer.length = 0;
    const gtmContainerReg = /GTM-/i;

    for (const gtmKey of Object.keys(window.google_tag_manager)) {
      if (gtmContainerReg.test(gtmKey) && window.google_tag_manager[gtmKey].dataLayer
        && window.google_tag_manager[gtmKey].dataLayer.reset
      ) {
        window.google_tag_manager[gtmKey].dataLayer.reset();
      }
    }
  }
}

Not sure why https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/devguides/datalayer#reset did not work. This one worked. — Benedikt, Feb 01 '23 at 13:31

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered May 11 '17 at 15:30

There's an undocumented way to cleanup the whole dataLayer using this method:

var gtm = window.google_tag_manager['GTM-XXXXXX'];
gtm.dataLayer.reset();

Now you don't necessarily need to do that since you can set the values you don't want anymore to undefined in your dataLayer:

dataLayer.push({
  'please_go_away': undefined
});

Resetting Data Layer variables in Single page Applications ( Google Tag manager)

3 Answers3