Installing the GTM container

Merge + rename, publish, verify.

This is the step-by-step for installing a generated container into your GTM workspace. It applies to any TrackingCoder download — single-event containers, monitoring containers, the bundle from a fresh generation.

Step 1 — Open your GTM workspace

Go to tagmanager.google.com and open the container that's installed on the site you scanned. The container ID looks like GTM-XXXXXXX and is usually visible in the site's <head>.

Step 2 — Import the container JSON

  • Click Admin (top nav) → Import Container.
  • Choose the file you downloaded from TrackingCoder.
  • Pick Existing workspace (not New). The new tags will live alongside your existing setup.
  • Choose Merge mode (not Overwrite — Overwrite deletes everything else).
  • For conflicts, pick Rename conflicting tags, triggers and variables. TrackingCoder names everything with a TC prefix so genuine conflicts are rare.
  • Hit Confirm.

Step 3 — Sanity-check in Preview Mode

Click Preview (top-right) → enter your site URL → open the page in the launched tab. The GTM Tag Assistant sidebar should now show the TC -prefixed tags as they fire. Trigger the event you tracked (click the button, submit the form) and confirm the TC Pusher / TC Click tag fires in the Tag Assistant.

Step 4 — Publish

Back in the workspace, click Submit (top-right) → give the version a name ("TC: add_to_cart" etc.) → Publish. Until you hit Publish, your live site still serves the previous version.

If you're a TC Pro user installing monitoring too

TC Pro's monitoring uses a second small container — the Monitor tag. Import it the same way, into the same workspace, then publish once. The Monitor tag and your event containers compose: each tracked event automatically pushes a signal the Monitor tag catches and reports back to your Pro monitoring dashboard.

Common questions

The Tag Assistant shows the tag firing but I see nothing in GA4. Three usual causes: (a) the Measurement ID isn't the one for your real GA4 property — paste your live G-XXX into the Channel ID field and regenerate; (b) GA4 Realtime can lag ~60 seconds; (c) your browser is blocking analytics (uBlock, Brave shields, AdGuard). Test in a clean profile.

I imported and republished but the live site still doesn't fire. Force-refresh the page (Ctrl+Shift+R / Cmd+Shift+R) — the GTM loader is cached aggressively. Some CDNs cache it for 5+ minutes; if you're behind Cloudflare, purge the cache for the page.

⚠ Don't import into the wrong workspace

If your business has separate GTM containers for staging and production, double-check the container ID in the top-left before importing. Importing into the wrong one is harmless (you can delete + re-import), but it'll waste your verification cycle.