Matomo 5.3 and new options in Tag Manager

In Matomo 5.3, several new options in Tag Manager were added to the “Matomo configuration variable” as advanced settings.

As far as I can see, however, they aren’t documented anywhere.
Among other things, you can now set “custom data.” But what exactly are custom data?

The release notes mention https://github.com/matomo-org/tag-manager/pull/943.
It mentions “setCustomData.” But I can’t find anything about it anywhere. What is it supposed to be?

Hi @utrautma . It’s basically so that you can include extra data in the requests sent from the JS tracker to the Matomo instance. For example, several of our plugins use it to send additional fields/data with each tracking request using something like _paq.push(['setCustomData', 'mykey', 'myvalue']); which means that requests sent from that tracker going forward will include data: {"mykey":"myvalue"} as a property on the request.

I thought that there was documentation about that JS tracker method, but you are correct; I only see it mentioned indirectly in the developer documentation. For example, the customData property on the tracker or the request specific custom dimension using the customData parameter to specify the custom dimension. Here’s a link to the setCustomData public method on the JS tracker code.

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@utrautma We updated the FAQ too - https://matomo.org/faq/tag-manager/set-up-the-matomo-configuration-variable/#show-advanced-settings

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