Sometimes, in Google Tag Manager’s Debug mode, you’ll see tags appear with the status Still Running, and you’ll (eventually) notice that these tags are not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
When you see this message on a tag, it technically means this:
The tag failed to signal Google Tag Manager that it is “done”.
The technical explanation is, naturally, too simple to be useful. In this article, I’ll explore what “done” means, and how especially Google Analytics tags manifest this behavior.
If you’re only interested in the latter, feel free to jump to the relevant section of this article.
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When is a tag “done”?
By default, a tag is done when its code is executed, and the browser is ready to move on to the next script block in queue. This can happen if the browser reaches the end of the script in turn to be executed, or if the script throws an error that is not caught.
For example, take a Custom HTML Tag that looks like this:
script>
console.log('Hello!');
script>When it’s time to fire this tag, Google Tag Manager injects this tag to the end of in the document object model, and then the browser proceeds to execute the code within the
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