{"id":21,"date":"2018-02-01T01:20:09","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T01:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bestworldsweb.com\/blog\/?p=21"},"modified":"2019-05-10T19:20:43","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T19:20:43","slug":"removing_pii_from_google_adwords_and_remarketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestworlds.com\/blog\/removing_pii_from_google_adwords_and_remarketing\/","title":{"rendered":"Removing PII from Google Adwords and Remarketing using Google Tag Manager"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sending PII (personally identifiable information) to Google Analytics, Adwords or Remarketing can get your Google account suspended. A common scenario is for an email address to be passed in the query string by a CRM or Email Service Provider. But what if you need that to happen for business reasons, so it\u2019s not an option to suppress the inclusion of that data getting passed in to your website?
\n<\/p>\n

Ironically it\u2019s Google\u2019s own javascript code for Analytics, Adwords and Remarketing that sends this data over, without any easy way to have it suppress query string parameters or filter out certain key pairs. Even our Google Account Managers could offer no solution for how to get our Adwords and Remarketing tags to stop sending over PII to them.<\/p>\n

Furthermore it can be hard to detect what you’re actually sending to Google using their own tools like the Google Tag Assistant, and the preview mode of Google Tag Manager.<\/p>\n

When we first faced this challenge and the threat of suspension by Google we tried several things, like this approach from Simo Ahava<\/a> to remove PII from Google Analytics. But Google kept telling us our Remarketing and Adwords were still receiving PII, which we eventually determined was because the raw URL was also being sent to those two regardless of what we tried to feed to them as \u201clocation\u201d values and such through Google Tag Manager.<\/p>\n

But finally our team member Jose Oronoz, with the help of Simo Ahava\u2019s post on the Google Tag Manager History Listener<\/a>, came up with a way to overwrite the URL stored in the browser history before any other calls are made, so there\u2019s no chance of sending any PII to any external services. The approach uses a custom event trigger firing on the gtm.load event and then it searches for and replaces any PII and overwrites the value the browser stores using the history.replaceState method of the HTML DOM.<\/p>\n

After implementing this solution our clients were cleared by Google.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a step by step explanation of how to implement this using Google Tag Manager.<\/p>\n

Create a Custom Event Trigger<\/h2>\n

Create a new trigger of type \u201cCustom Event\u201d:<\/p>\n

\"Create<\/p>\n

Then in the Trigger configuration set the \u201cEvent Name\u201d to \u201cgtm.load\u201d which will result in this trigger firing every time Google Tag Manager is fired:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Create a New Custom HTML Tag:<\/h2>\n

Now we\u2019ll create a new Tag of type \u201cCustom HTML\u201d and connect our trigger to it:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After creating the tag, enter the following javascript in the \u201cHTML\u201d section:<\/p>\n