PART 1
GTM & GA4 Configuration
for Websites Using ClubRunner CMS

ClubRunner needs to know your GTM container ID in order to inject the tracking code automatically on every page. Without this, no data reaches GTM or GA4.

The page has two tracking fields:

This is the single most important setting for ClubRunner sites. It prevents traffic from ClubRunner's own domains from being interpreted as external visits and breaking ongoing sessions, and prevents clicks to these domains from being counted as outbound external link clicks.

GA4 can automatically track clicks on outbound links via Enhanced Measurement. Since we handle this in GTM with ClubRunner exceptions (see section 2b), the built-in feature must be turned off — otherwise duplicate events are created.

Events created in GTM can carry parameters (e.g. which URL was clicked). Parameters don't automatically appear in GA4 reports — they must be registered as "custom dimensions" to become searchable and reportable. The reports are built in the next section, 1d.

Create one row per parameter:

GA4's standard reports show total counts per event but not what was clicked or searched for. That requires an Exploration (Explore). Build one shared exploration with five tabs — one per custom event — so all the detail data lives in one place. The settings below are a starting point; adjust them yourself to tailor the reports further.

Getting started

1. Go to Explore → Blank exploration.
2. Name the exploration, e.g. Custom events [period].
3. Open the Variables panel (left) and click + next to Dimensions and Metrics respectively to add these shared variables for all tabs:
   Dimensions: Event name Link text Link URL File name Search term Special Event Label Metric: Event count
4. Then create five tabs in the order below. Each tab is configured in the Tab Settings panel (right).
   Tip: After the first report, click the down arrow on the tab name and duplicate the tab — then you only need to make a few small changes to the new tab's Settings. Edit the tab name by clicking on it.

Tab 1 — Outbound clicks

Tab 2 — Sitesearch CR

Tab 3 — Downloads

Tab 4 — Bulletin viewed

Tab 5 — Special Event

There are two types of referral spam with entirely different mechanisms, and they require different responses.

Modern MP spammers (e.g. leadsgo.io) inject fake sessions directly against GA4's collection server via the Measurement Protocol — your gtag.js never runs. This means "List unwanted referrals" has no effect: the list is a client-side check that MP spam never passes through. The sessions are still recorded in GA4 with the spam domain intact as the source. The only effective protection against MP spam is the Web hostname traffic filter (see below).

Crawling spam (older bots, button and traffic spam) actually visits the site. Gtag.js loads, and the list prevents the spam domain from being written as the referral source — the session appears under direct rather than referral. The session is still recorded, but does not skew the traffic source report.

The list below is still worth maintaining as a monitoring layer for crawling spam and email proxies. GA4 allows a maximum of 50 domains per data stream — the list below contains around 30.

Known spam domains

Button/widget spam (priority 2)

Poses as shared social buttons to attract clicks.

Traffic spam (priority 2)

Domains that sell or simulate website traffic.

Email/newsletter proxies to watch

May be legitimate — investigate if you don't recognise the sender before blocking.

Web hostname traffic — effective protection against MP spam

GA4's Web hostname traffic filter removes hits where the hostname does not match your real domains. MP spam by definition lacks a valid hostname from your site, making the filter reliably effective against that type of spam traffic — unlike the domain list above.

Google Search Console (GSC) shows which search terms in Google lead visitors to the site — the incoming search traffic. This complements the search term tracking in section 2i, which captures what visitors search for on the site once they're already there.

1. Click Link.
2. Select the Search Console property that matches the site.
3. Select the data stream and confirm.

Once the link is active, data appears under Reports → Acquisition → Search Console with the following dimensions:

GTM has built-in variables that capture click data (which URL, which link text, etc.). They must be enabled manually before they can be used in triggers and tags.

Tick the following under the "Clicks" section:

Close the configuration panel (the cross, top right). The variables are now available in all triggers and tags.

The central tag that initialises GA4. All other GA4 event tags reference this one. It must be of type Google tag (not the older "GA4 Configuration").

Microsoft Clarity is a free tool for session recording and heatmaps. It can also serve as an independent metric to compare against GA4 figures, for instance to estimate drop-off from declined cookies.

The Clarity project ID is found under Settings → Setup → Get tracking code in Microsoft Clarity at clarity.microsoft.com. It's a short alphanumeric string, e.g. abc123xyz.

Option A — Clarity template (recommended)

Option B — Custom HTML

Registers clicks on external links. ClubRunner's own domains, bulletin links and page file downloads must be excluded so they aren't counted as external or double-counted against the download tags.

Step 1 — Create the trigger

Step 2 — Create the tag

ClubRunner does not include GTM on /bulletin/View/ pages. The solution is to capture the click on the link in the originating session instead, which produces an event tied to the active session.

The trigger must also be added as an exception in the "Outbound link click" trigger (section 2d) so that bulletin clicks aren't counted twice.

Step 1 — Create the trigger

Step 2 — Create the tag

Captures clicks on ClubRunner's document links (files in Documents). Match on the path /documents/sv-se/ in the URL rather than the file extension — ClubRunner's document links don't always have a file extension, and path matching is simpler and more robust.

Step 1 — Create the trigger

Step 2 — Create the tag

Files uploaded in the Download Page Files widget are stored by ClubRunner on a separate domain: clubrunner.blob.core.windows.net. These files sit under a path prefix that starts with the district's/club's ClubRunner ID (e.g. /00000060099/). Since that ID is unique to the district/club, it's sufficient as a match — the trigger then becomes independent of language and folder structure. They require a separate trigger because the domain differs from your public site.

The blob domain must also be included in the exceptions in the "Outbound link click" trigger (section 2d) so these downloads aren't simultaneously counted as external clicks.

Step 1 — Create the trigger

Step 2 — Create the tag

GA4 groups page views by page_location (the actual URL). On ClubRunner, this often causes the same page to be split across several rows for three reasons: renamed pages are reachable via an old alias URL alongside the clean address, case in the path (/Events vs /events, /ClubInfo/… vs /clubinfo/…) creates duplicates, and a trailing slash does the same (/clubsmap/ vs /clubsmap). The variable below fixes all three.

When a page is renamed, ClubRunner lets the old address keep working — but without a 301 redirect. The content is served on a long alias URL, e.g. /60099/Page/Show?ClassCode=Page&Slug=…, alongside the clean /page/<slug>. The result is two pages in the report for the same content.

Here's what it actually looks like for the same page reached via two entry points:

The point: the path /page/support-logga-in-hjälp is identical in both canonicals — only the host differs. That's why the variable builds page_location from the canonical path (correct in both cases) but always sets it on the public domain via location.origin.

Step 1 — Variable that builds a clean page_location

Canonical path (renamed pages). The variable takes the path from the canonical tag (the same clean /page/<slug> regardless of whether the visitor arrived via the alias URL or the clean address), sets it on the public domain via location.origin, and keeps only campaign parameters (utm_*, gclid, etc.) so attribution survives.

Case correction. The line path = path.toLowerCase() lowercases the path — ClubRunner is case-insensitive, so /Events, /ClubInfo/… and /ClubsMap are merged with their lowercase variants. In a year of raw data for rotary2405.se, the period immediately before the GTM clean-up (1 March 2025 – 28 February 2026), 12,681 of the period's 30,942 views (41%) were spread across 207 such duplicate groups — /clubinfo/* was often split into three or four case variants. Lowercasing also normalises the case of %-encoding (%C3%A4 → %c3%a4). Since only the path is lowercased, campaign parameter values are unaffected.

Trailing slash. The line that strips a trailing / (except on the root, which is left untouched) likewise merges /clubsmap/ with /clubsmap — ClubRunner responds identically whether the path ends with a slash or not. In the same year of data, trailing-slash duplicates accounted for a further 10,664 views spread across 106 groups. Combined, the case and trailing-slash corrections together merge 259 duplicate groups — 16,837 of the period's 30,942 views (54%). One concrete example: /ClubsMap, /clubsmap and /clubsmap/ were three separate rows in the report despite all pointing to the same page — 1,287 views between them.

Step 2 — Override page_location in the Google tag

Open the Google tag from section 2b. Under Configuration settings, click Add parameter and fill in:

ClubRunner's built-in search box (the field with id="searchString" in the header) doesn't send the search term as a query parameter (?q=…), which is what GA4's Enhanced Measurement expects. Instead, ClubRunner navigates to a path of the form /Search/<term>. This means the search term must be extracted from the path using a Custom JavaScript variable.

Step 1 — Variable that extracts the search term

Step 2 — Trigger

Step 3 — Tag

Beyond the general categories above (outbound clicks, downloads, search) you sometimes want to track individual, selected links or buttons in reports — e.g. a sign-up link — with a readable label in GA4 (e.g. "Interest form") instead of just the link address. A shared event name, special_event, is used for all of these, regardless of how many different links/buttons are tracked. New special events normally require no new trigger or tag — just a row change in one of two shared components. On ClubRunner web pages, links come in three main types, depending on which widget is used for the link:

Recommended solution: data-ga-label in a Custom widget

Use this pattern when the link/button sits in a Custom widget (HTML-editable) — simplest, and requires no future GTM changes.

Example code for a blue button that changes colour on mouse-over (same style and colours as ClubRunner's "Read more" buttons) whose label (Interest form) shows up clearly in the GA4 report:

Text widgets and button widgets have no HTML editing and cannot carry the attribute — the method under "Configure your first special event" below is used instead.

Base setup — built once, regardless of which variant is used

Step 1 — Variable: Click Data Label

Step 2 — Variable: Special Event Label Lookup (created empty)

Step 3 — Variable: Special Event Label (fallback chain)

Step 4 — Trigger: Special Event – Attribute

Configure your first special event

Which of the steps below applies depends on the widget type (see the table above) — the base setup works the same regardless of whether your first case has a label or not.

If Custom widget (label): add data-ga-label to the HTML code as in the example above. Nothing more to do — Special Event – Attribute captures it automatically.

If text widget or button widget (no label possible):

Step 5 — Add a row to Special Event Label Lookup

Step 6 — Trigger: Special Event – Link List

Step 7 — Tag: GA4 – Special Event

Step 8 — GA4: register custom dimension

Update — adding more special events later

• Custom widget (with label): add data-ga-label="label" to the HTML code. Done, no GTM change.
• Text widget/button widget (no label): add a row to Special Event Label Lookup. Does the Special Event – Link List trigger already exist (step 6)? Add |newURL to the end of the RegEx expression. Doesn't exist yet? Create it per step 6, and attach it to the GA4 – Special Event tag.

Never publish changes without testing them in GTM's Preview mode. Every unsaved change in the workspace is a "Draft" — only after publishing do the changes become active and start sending data to GA4.

ClubRunner does not add GTM code on the page types below. They are therefore not registered as page views in GA4, but we compensate with click events.

GTM's built-in "Tag Coverage" report (Admin → Tag Coverage) shows how many pages lack GTM tagging. For ClubRunner sites the figure looks dramatic, but the majority of untagged pages are bulletin pages, document pages and internal admin pages — not primarily public-facing content. The report updates automatically when the GTM container is published or when visitors generate new traffic.

Since the portal itself runs ClubRunner, its own infrastructure should be kept internal, just as for district/club.

Turn off Outbound clicks in Enhanced Measurement (same reason as section 1b — we handle outbound clicks in GTM so we can attach the target domain). Other Enhanced Measurement features can stay on.

Register custom dimensions so clicks can be reported per site:

Detailed click steps are in section 2b (Google tag) and 2c (Clarity).
Also add the renamed-pages consolidation (section 2h), including the page_location rewrite in the portal's Google tag.

First enable the built-in click variables (Click URL, Click Text, etc.) as described in section 2a. Then create a variable that extracts just the hostname from the clicked link, so the report can be grouped per site instead of per full URL.

The variable returns, for example, rotary2405.se or rotarystudent.se and strips a leading www. so the same site isn't split across two rows.

A single event that fires on every link that leaves rotary.se. It scales automatically as new district or other sites are added — no list to maintain.

Step 1 — Create the trigger

Step 2 — Create the tag

The portal needs its own Exploration showing onward clicks to districts and other sites. The configuration is simpler than "Custom events" since there's only one event — outbound_click — but with link_domain as the primary dimension to break down clicks by target site.

Getting started

1. Go to Explore → Blank exploration.
2. Name the exploration Portal traffic.
3. Add these shared variables in the Variables panel:
   Dimensions: Event name Link domain Link URL Metric: Event count
4. Then create two tabs in the order below.

Tab 1 — Event sum

An overview of all event types — gives a quick picture of the traffic without filters.

Tab 2 — Outbound clicks

Clicks broken down by target site and URL — the portal's primary reporting tool.