Hide the tag GA4

[Chardonneaur]

Hi Team,

Please remove the following:

as people need to use the gtag.js tag instead.
In GTM, the GA4 tag has been subsituted by gtag instead.
Having it is causing confusion.

[snake14]

Hi @Chardonneaur . Thank you for taking the time to create this issue. It looks like both tags were copied from the TagManagerExtended plugin. Do you happen to know why both tags were created in that plugin? The JavaScript looks identical between the two, so why can't customers use either one?

[ronan-hello]

Hi,

The TagManagerExtended plugin has both due to backwards compatibility.
When the plugin was first released, only the "Google Analytics 4" tag existed.
Then Google updates the GTM GA4 tag to gtag.js and renames "Google Analytics 4" to "Google Tag".
The Matomo Tag Manager does not allow renaming a custom tag (this breaks the whole container).
So I simply duplicate the tag to match Google's recommendation and GTM behavior.

Today, the GA4 tag should be removed and no longer used by anyone.

[snake14]

Thank you for the explanation @ronan-hello . Since the GA4 Tag has been released, we now have the same issue of backwards compatibility. I guess we can try creating a migration script to replace all instances of GA4 Tag with Google Tag. If we can get that to work, we might be able to get rid of the GA4 Tag. Although, we'd have the issue of any containers exported containing that tag type not importing correctly anymore.

[ronan-hello]

Hi @snake14, Yes of course it would be a great idea.
What about upgrading the Tag Manager to allow tags to be removed from core or plugins ?

[AltamashShaikh]

@Chardonneaur @ronan-hello FYI, we are going to do below steps and will hide the tag instead of removing it.

1. Hide the GA4 tag, when someone tries to create a new tag
2. Existing tag should still work