In the digital era, access to accurate information is worth more than money, and smart companies are using specialised products to improve their marketing intelligence. Google Tag Manager is one interesting product that can be instrumental for successful management of marketing and website analytics tags and event tracking to ensure effective and enhanced data capture. Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tool that allows you to make changes to your tags and tracking from platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook and Twitter to name just a few, a best of all you don’t need to wait for a developer to add or amend code and risk website downtime.
This brief overview is a great place to start learning about Google Tag Manager and its fundamental business applications:
What is Google Tag Manager used for?
On the technical level, Google Tag Manager tracks JavaScript and HTML tags associated with certain tags. Tags, which are sometimes described as web beacons or tracking pixels, are small snippets of code added to a web page or element that can helpfully track user behaviour.
Tags can be triggered by certain actions, while the type of information to be tracked can be defined in advance. In practice, this allows the website owner to know how users interact with their content, constantly feeding new data into products such as Google Analytics and Google Ads which allows for better customisation and and updating strategies based on performances.
Who needs Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager is especially useful when there is a need to manage a large number of tags in real time, in fact anyone who has Web Analytics or Digital Marketing campaigns should be using a Tag Manager such as GTM. All businesses that rely on online marketing to a considerable degree stand to benefit from adoption of this digital tool.
Since proper use of tags requires some technical knowledge, those duties are usually assigned to a data analytics specialist or a marketing manager. In micro-enterprises, it’s possible for the business owner to personally track online statistics through Google Tag Manager on a regular basis.
How to use Google Tag Manager?
All you need to get started is:
- A Google Account associated with Google Tag Manager
- Access to your website’s source code, or a web developer who can help deploy the initial Google Tag Manager script.
- A basic understanding of Google Tag Manager, namely how to create a tag and how to generate basic triggers (rules that determine when to fire or load a tag).
The first step in the process of taking control over online marketing analytics is learning how to set up the necessary tags and define key variables and triggers for each of them – undertaking some introductory training would be useful before publishing tags to a website.
