Do I need the Croct tag to fire before or after my GA4 tags in the container?
Our container already has GA4 tags reading the ecommerce data layer, and I am adding the Croct tag right next to them on the same triggers.
Does firing order matter here, or can the two just coexist? I want to avoid a situation where one tag consuming the event somehow affects the other
2 answers
Order does not matter. The Croct tag reads events from the data layer independently, it is not intercepting or consuming anything, so GA4 still sees the same pushes regardless of which fires first. It also does not emit duplicate GA4 events, it just maps what is in the data layer to Croct events.
Worth separating two directions in your head: this inbound tag is data flowing into Croct. There is also a Croct-to-analytics export that streams audience and experiment data out to GA4, but that is a separate outbound connection, not part of this tag, so it does not enter into the firing-order question at all.
We run both on the exact same all-pages and ecommerce triggers with no configured order and it has been fine for months. Both tags read the same recommended events off the data layer, so there is nothing to sequence.
For what it is worth the tracking cost is negligible too, Croct batches several events in a couple of milliseconds, so there was no measurable main-thread contention when we added it beside GA4.
Good, left them unordered on the shared triggers and both are reporting cleanly. Thanks both