Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that allows marketers to quickly and easily add tracking and marketing tags to their websites without the need for code changes. It provides a central location to manage and update tags, making it easier to track and measure the performance of marketing campaigns and website activities.
As a marketer, collecting data is one of the most important parts of your job. Sometimes, you’re collecting data for your website, another time to run a marketing campaign or to understand your customers better. It’s a never-ending process and Google Analytics might be helping you out with it.
But with Google Tag Manager, the process becomes more efficient.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tag management system offered by Google. It allows you to create and manage tags on your website. With GTM, you can add and update tags without needing to write code. As a marketer, you might not be equipped with coding, so GTM eliminates the tedious process of creating tags. Well yes, that’s not it. GTM has a lot to offer.
GTM is free and you can check if it fits your needs or not. So the first step to trying GTM is to set up an account. Let’s see how you can create your GTM account.
Learn how to choose the right Google Tag Manager Consultants in this blog.
The process of setting up a Google Tag Manager (GTM) account is divided into a few steps. Here’s how you can set up your account:
3. Install the GTM tracking code: Once you have created a container, you will be given a GTM tracking code. This code needs to be installed on every page of your website or app that you want to track. The code should be placed in the header of your website or app, immediately after the opening <body> tag. You can choose to do this now or later as well. Once you’re done, click “ok” and your Google Tag Manager account is finally set.
The next step requires you to create tags. But before moving forward to learn how you can create tags, let’s first understand what tags are.
In technical terms, tags are snippets of code that are used to track user behavior or gather information from a website or mobile app. For instance, you want to know how many visitors are arriving on your page. You also want to know how long they are staying on your website if they are filling in the form or not, and which links they are clicking.
Learn about tagging best practices in our blog here.
You can create a tag for anything you want to know. In GTM, tags are added and managed through the GTM interface. They can be easily added, modified, or removed without the need to update the code on the website or app. The only thing you need to do is embed a code once on your site - every time you want to create a tag, Google Tag Manager embeds and codes it for you.
But knowing Google tags isn’t enough. There are other vital elements that you need to be familiar with: triggers and variables.
Triggers: A trigger is a set of conditions that determine when a tag should fire. It checks your website or app tries to detect the condition and asks tags to fire. For example, you can create a trigger that fires a tag when a user completes a purchase on your website, or when a user views a particular page on your website. Triggers can be based on specific events, such as clicks or form submissions, or on more complex conditions, such as specific URLs or user behavior.
Variables: In triggers and tags, variables are used to filter when a particular tag should be triggered. It works somehow differently for both, triggers and tags. In triggers, variables are responsible for telling the trigger when to fire the tag. And in the case of tags, variables are the ones that define the exact data the tag should collect.
You can easily create tags, triggers, and variables in your GTM account. So now you’ve become familiar with tags and their other parts. It’s time to move on to see how you can create tags.
How to create tags?
Without tags, there is no point in setting up a Google Tag Manager account. The next thing you want to do right after setting up a GTM account is to learn how to create tags. Let us take you through the whole process step by step:
And you’re finally done creating your tag. Now all you need to do is to publish the tag so that it can start collecting data. But before publishing it, it’s important to test the tag and debug if there’s any issue. So let’s see how you can test and debug the issue.
You can test your tag through GTM easily. Here’s how you can do that:
Now you know how to create, test, and publish tags. However, even after knowing how to manage tags, marketers sometimes have difficulties managing them. You can take the help of extensions. There are a variety of extensions out there that you can install to help you manage tags.
Google Tag Manager extensions can help you set up your GTM and debug issues quickly. There are many GTM extensions out there, but here are 3 of the most popular:
Extensions can make your workflow easy and help you with Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics as well.
Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool that allows marketers to easily add tracking and marketing tags to their website. By setting up GTM and creating tags, triggers, and variables, you can track and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns and website activities. Don't forget to test and debug your tags to ensure that they are functioning correctly.
If you need help implementing GTM or analyzing the data it collects, the team at Analytico is here to help. Our team of digital analytics experts can help you get the most out of GTM and other digital analytics tools. Contact us today to learn more about our analytics services.