Resetting Data Layer variables in Single page Applications ( Google Tag manager)

Question

Trying to achieve content grouping in mobile site which is SPA.

The scenario goes like this: When I am visiting a PDP page for the first time, category variable is set and this is sent to content groups in Universal Analytics Tag. If after this I go back to the homepage, the category variable doesn't update and homepage is also grouped under the same content group of previous PDP page.

This variable only updates when I visit another PDP page.

I am using a custom event PageLoad to mimic the pageView event. Just want the data layer varaibles to refresh within the consecutive PageLoad event.

Thanks

Answer 1

There is now a documented way to reset the data layer. See Reset in the Data layer docs.

If you push a function to the dataLayer, it'll give you access to an object with get, set, and reset semantics. For this question in particular, reset is the relevant bit.

Answer 2

There's an undocumented way to cleanup the whole dataLayer using this method:

var gtm = window.google_tag_manager['GTM-XXXXXX'];
gtm.dataLayer.reset();

Now you don't necessarily need to do that since you can set the values you don't want anymore to undefined in your dataLayer:

dataLayer.push({
  'please_go_away': undefined
});