Google Tag Manager not tracking links clicks on images and icons

Question

In Google Tag Manager, I set it up to track some data from clicks on elements that contain a certain class and record an event in Google Analytics. It seems to work just fine for text links, but I run into problems if there is another tag inside the link for an image, icon, etc. For example, the following would work fine:

<a href="link.html" class="track_this" data-tracking-info="my info">Click here</a>

But this won't work:

<a href="link.html" class="track_this"  data-tracking-info="my info">
  <span class="icon click-here"></span>
</a>

And something like this will work if you click on the text, but not if you click on the icon:

<a href="link.html" class="track_this"  data-tracking-info="my info">
  <span class="icon click-here"></span> Click Here
</a>

I know that I could add the "track_this" class into the span for the icon, but it gets REALLY messy in more complicated scenarios. Like imagine having a thumbnail image with an icon and some text below it all wrapped into one a tag. I'd have to put that class and the tracking info on the image tag, the span for the icon, the div for the text, etc.

Is there a better way to do this? Thanks!

Answer 1

I could speak more definitively on this if I could see how your GTM was setup, but my guess is that you are using an "All Elements" trigger to capture these link clicks, and filtering on "Click Classes" or "Click Element". The issue with this is that, when the link tag (<a></a>) contains another element, such as a <span>, even though that triggers your link to open, the element that GTM records as receiving the click is the span, not the link.

If you want to fix this, there are two options, either of which should work.

The first is to switch to using a "Click - Just Links" trigger type, and filter on the class "track_this". For this trigger, GTM lets click events "bubble" up until they hit a link element, and then it tests your trigger against that link, instead of the element that was clicked on. Simply using this trigger type should work for all three of your samples.

The other option is to use a more advanced filter with the "Click - All Elements" trigger. If you modify the trigger so it fires on "Some Clicks", and then make the condition that "Click Element matches CSS selector:"

.track_this, .track_this *

then it will register a click on any element that has the track_this class, as well as a click on any element inside those elements.