Adding Instant.page to Google Tag Manager

One of my colleagues at Adwise recently told me about Instant.page. By adding a small code snippet to your HTML, you get just in time preloading to decrease latency. It’s really easy to implement and free to use!

Of course we could manually add this code snipped to the page, but since we use Google Tag Manager for most of our clients we thought it would be even quicker and easier if we could just add the code snippet to a Custom HTML Tag in GTM. However, if we add the snippet and try to publish the container we get an error…

Tag Manager error

Luckily, there’s a blog post by Simo Ahava for almost every Google Tag Manager issue you can think of and this is no exception. About a year ago Simo wrote a blogpost about adding HTML Elements to the page programmatically and it introduces a workaround for the error message we got. Using his instructions, I rewrote the Instant.page snippet so it can be added to the page through a Custom HTML Tag. It looks like this:

It can then be added to Google Tag Manager like this:

Add the rewritten snippet to a Custom HTML Tag.

And the resulting rendered HTML looks like this (you might have to click the image to zoom in a bit):

rendered HTML
The resulting HTML.

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