GTM naming conventions best practice and why you should care

In this guide, we share our formulae for clear and consistent naming conventions to help you tidy up your container and introduce some management governance.

We do not claim this to be the only or best way of doing it, but it's a starting point for you to sort your ship out and put your naming conventions on paper.

As your organisation matures, so too will your website and analytics setup. You might add and shelve different marketing campaigns, change critical functions on your website (e.g. changing that email newsletter sign-up from one provider to another), or migrate from Universal Analytics to GA4.

Naturally, your tracking will get more complicated as part of this process. These variables can make it challenging to track which tags and triggers are in operation, what they do, and when to remove any redundant legacy tracking.

1. A build-up of legacy tracking in your container increases its overall size. This bloat affects your website load time, with your users loading a large amount of possibly redundant tracking each time they move across your website pages. This can impact user experience and potentially cause other issues (especially if data is being captured at all).

2. You might be doubling up on data for specific events! For instance, you might send page views to GA4 on all page views and send page views when people look at your donation form. These problems become more immediately apparent when consistent naming conventions are in place. If you know what you're looking for in the title of your tags, triggers, etc., you know what to filter by and how to spot when something has been duplicated.

3. It makes GTM easier to understand. Clear, consistent naming conventions can help you keep track of your GTM setup, and, over time, understand how it works and what may be causing any issues that arise.

Below are our recommendations for naming conventions. Most importantly, keep an eye on consistent capitalisation and use of semantic, digestible language. Remember to set these up with your most scrambled self in mind! After all, you might need to revisit these tags on a chaotic day when there's an urgent issue that needs fixing and need to be able to quickly find the element you're looking for without having to filter through too much noise to find it.

Containers

Your GTM container will be a subfolder within your Tag Manager account. For example, within our CharityWise account, a container holds all the tracking for the CharityWise website.

Recommended naming convention for GTM containers:

• [Company/Website Name] - [environment]

For example:

• CharityWise - Production

• CharityWise - Staging

Workspaces

You can set up workspaces in your container. This function helps multiple people work on different changes to your tracking setup while minimising conflicts.

TIP! You can create up to three workspaces on the free version of GTM and unlimited workspaces in GTM 360.

Recommended naming convention for workspaces:

• [Agency/Name initials] – [What is being worked on]

For example:

• Fresh Egg – Checkout funnel stages

• Fresh Egg – Consent mode rollout

Folders

Within your container workspace, there is a tab for folders. You can use this to further organise your tags, triggers, and variables for easier oversight and future review.

Recommended naming convention for folders:

• [Platform] - [description]

For example:

• GA - Ecommerce events

• Google Ads - Q&B journey

The Google Tag

Recommended naming convention for Google Tags:

• GA - Google Tag

The Logic: This element is the most important to identify. If incorrectly set up here, it will impact other tracking areas. Including the hyphen ("-") in this tag ensures that when you look in the GTM interface, it'll sit at the top of the list of your GA4 tags.

GA Event Tags

The recommended format for GA4 event tags is as follows:

• GA [GA4 event name]

For example:

• GA form_submit

• GA click_cta

• GA view_item

The Logic: Excluding hyphens ensures these tags show beneath the Google Tag. Keeping the event names the same as in GA4 and as simple as possible helps reduce the cognitive load when looking at your GTM interface.

Marketing Pixel Tags

Recommended naming convention for marketing pixel tags:

• [Agency] – [Platform] – [Pixel type/Event name] – [Retirement date]

For example:

• Fresh Egg – Facebook – Base pixel – 11/2026

• Rotten Egg – Instagram – Purchase – 01/2027

The Logic: Marketing pixels require more information. This is one area of tracking you'll want to keep a firm grip on, as often these tags have a designated shelf life. They are usually set up to track key marketing campaigns and should be deleted shortly after to prevent build-up in your container. Slow site load times will negatively impact your quality score, which is one of the key metrics Google uses to determine the cost to run your ads. Allowing these tags to linger will not only impact the quality of your website but will potentially cost you money in the long run. This is why you also want to include the agency in the tag name so you know who is responsible for managing them.

Other Tags

Recommended naming convention for other tags:

• [Platform] - [Tag type] - [Event/Description]

For example:

• Facebook – Conversion – purchase

• HubSpot - cHTML - Form listener

• OneTrust - CMP - Cookie banner

Custom Event Triggers

Recommended naming convention for custom events:

• CE - [Data layer event name] - [Additional details]

If your trigger fires on all instances of a custom event:

• CE - [Data layer event name]

For example:

• CE - click_button

• CE - form_submit - newsletter form

• CE - nav_click - /my-account/

The Logic: standard trigger names like 'CE - click_button' let you know the exact rules of the trigger without having to click into it.
This practice is a commonly used format for custom events, making it more accessible should you have different industry professionals working with your GTM container.

Other Triggers

Recommended naming convention for most triggers:

• [Trigger type] - [Additional details]

For example:

• Link Click - mailto:

• Page View - /blog/

• Scroll - 25,50,75,90%

Variables

Recommended naming convention for variables:

• [Variable type] - [details]

For example:

• CJS - custom html ID

• URL - page path

• DOM - click target URL

• DLV - form_name

We've taken you through our recommendations for GTM naming conventions, breaking down how we name different tags, triggers, and variables and explained why having clear and well structured names is essential for container management.