Using Google Analytics asynchronous code from external JS file

Question

I\'m trying to add the asynchronous version of the Google Analytics tracking code to a website.

I\'d like to keep the JavaScript in a separate file, and call it from

Answer 1

Honestly I have not read through all these posts since they are rather old. However I recently had the need to add Gtag (google tag manager for analytics tracking) to an old website that was a 1000 static HTML files and (LUCKILY) a the html files had a single include js file for the spry menu bar, like i said very old site! For my purposes I wasn't worried about performance but measuring the traffic so we can migrate it. your case may be different but the below code will work for external js includes of Gtag.

I used this file to load the code below since the above code is for legacy ga.js

//Added Google Anyltics Tag Container Tracking - included here to min rebuilding DOM 

function loadGoogleAnalytics(){
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); 
    ga.type = 'text/javascript'; 
    ga.async = true;
    ga.src = 'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-XXXXXXXXX-X';

    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
    s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
}

loadGoogleAnalytics(); //Create the script 

window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];

function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}

gtag('js', new Date());

gtag('config', 'UA-XXXXXXXXX-1');
//Confirmed with Google tag Assistant