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So, you’ve created your brand new website. The site is ticking along nicely, your ads are firing and all of your products and services are ready to go. But the real question is, how exactly do you keep on top of your website’s performance? How do you know which of your pages are performing the best, or which ones will need a little bit of work? The answer lies with Google Tag Manager, a free tool developed by Google to help businesses take control of their analytics and seize the initiative regarding the performance of their website.
What are “Tags”?
To understand what Google Tag Manager is, we must first take a look at what a “tag” is in this context. Marketing Tags are what we call tiny snippets of code that are added to your website in order to collect information and data. These tags can be used for loads of different objectives, such as:
remarketing to previous site visitors
monitoring form submissions
tracking how all of your users are arriving at your website
monitoring link clicks and goal completions
Adding these tags to your site is a surprisingly simple process that we’ll go into later, but know that it’s very novice-friendly in terms of dealing with code; you won’t need to actually go in and modify any of your website’s coding. This makes implementing tags something that anyone with a functioning website can do!
Google Tag Manager Defined
Google Tag Manager is a free tool designed to allow users to easily manage and deploy all of these marketing tags. With this tool, you create and define the types of tags you’d like to use, implement them into your website and monitor them- all under one tool. Overseeing tags is done at the account level; by this I mean you can manage tags for one or multiple different websites under the umbrella of one account. This is perfect for marketing agencies (or freelancers such as yours truly) who need to be able to look after multiple clients’ websites at one time.
Using Google Tag Manager
As with any new tool you discover in the world of digital marketing, it can be a little intimidating knowing where to start and what to do when using Tag Manager. I’ve written the following to serve as a loose guideline on all the moving parts of Tag Manager, what they mean and how you use them.
1. Creating your account
Getting started with Google Tag manager is fairly straightforward. Upon loading the tool up, you’ll need to find the Create Account button in the top right corner of the page. From here, you can choose a name for your Tag Manager account (this can be anything from the admin’s name to the name of the business).
2. Creating a container
The next step towards creating and managing all of your tags is to create a container. A container snippet is a piece of JavaScript code that contains all of the triggers and tags that determine when and how your data will be collected. Typically, you will have one container snippet for each unique domain; so all of your website’s tags will be held in one place. You will be told to name your container right after naming your account; this name is usually just the name of the website you’ll be using the container on. Then it’s just a simple matter of choosing the most relevant platform you’ll be using from a list and clicking “Create”. Once you’ve created your account and container, you’ll be brought to Google’s Terms of Service, which you’ll need to agree to.
3. Implementing your container
Once you’ve agreed to Google’s Terms of Service, you’ll be shown a sample of what your container code will look like. Looking at big blocks of code like this can be quite daunting for those with little coding experience, but it’s nothing to worry about. You will be met with two sections of code that will begin and end with the following:
<!-- Google Tag Manager -->
<!-- End Google Tag Manager -->
<!-- Google Tag Manager (noscript) -->
<!-- End Google Tag Manager (noscript) -->
To implement the first section of this code, you will need to open up the HTML of your website’s pages and copy and paste the code immediately after the <Head> section of the page; this code uses what’s known as JavaScript extract information. The second section will need to be copy and pasted immediately after the page’s <Body> section; this code will only come into play when a website visitor has JavaScript disabled. This means that all your tags will still function regardless of whether JavaScript is enabled or not. Both of these container snippets will need to be added to every single page that you want to track on your website. Once completed, this is the extent of what you’ll need to do in terms of directly adding stuff to your website’s code.
4. Understanding tags
Now that you have created your containers and added them to your website, you need some tags to manage! Tags are the 3rd party snippets of code that are used by marketing platforms to gather data in integration with other apps and sites. If you are looking to analyse the performance of your website, the most common tags you’ll be using in Google Tag manager may include:
Google Analytics Universal Tracking Code
Facebook Pixels
AdWords Remarketing Code
AdWords
It is important to note that Google Tag Manager is not a reporting or data analysis tool in itself. It is simply a very useful tool in customising and managing the types of tags and data that you want to see analysed in third party data analysis tools; such as Google Analytics.
5. Understanding triggers
Triggers in Google Tag Manager are what cause a tag to start firing, and they sit inside of your container snippets. Triggers will describe the specific events that cause a tag to fire, some of the most common examples of these events (which you may recognise if you’ve used Google Analytics before) include:
Pageviews (whenever a page on your site is seen by a user)
Link clicks (whenever a user clicks a specific link for a page)
Form submissions
Scroll depth (you can select how far a down a user scrolls to trigger this event; showing you how much on average a user sees of a certain page)
Triggers themselves are also made up of several parts, including:
Variables: These are placeholders for the values that you define (more on this below). Variables come in two distinct formats: built-in and user-defined. Built-in variables already exist in tag manager, and only need to be selected to activate them. User-defined variables are custom tags you can create for specific purposes unique to your needs, such as capturing when a goal has been completed.
Operators: These are what define the relationship between your values and variables, enabling the trigger to fire. A good example is if you only want a tag to fire when a user completes a transaction; your trigger would fire when the variable is equal to the value of your checkout page. Operators can be summarised as the glue that holds your values and variables together, allowing triggers to work properly.
Values: This is what we call the text field that you fill out to complete a trigger’s filter. For example, a tag with a pageview event-based trigger would use the following;
PageURL contains /products/; the value here is the text field “products”.
6. Creating your tags
With a clear picture of what tags and triggers are and how they work, we can now move on to how you can actually create a tag in Google Tag manager, by following this simple process:
Create a new tag in the Tag Manager Dashboard by selecting the “Add a New Tag” option.
Configure your tag by giving it a unique title, and then click anywhere within the “Tag Configuration” box to choose a tag type.
Choose a tag type from the dozens of pre-set tag types that are listed in this section. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll use the “Classic Google Analytics” tag type as an example.
For this example, to have your tag tracked by Google Analytics, you’ll need to input the Web Property ID found in your GA account. Then you just need to select a “Track Type” from a range of options, including “Page View”, “Impressions”, “Form Submissions”, and more
Choose your trigger to determine when your tag will fire. For example, if you selected the “Page View” tag type, you would potentially want a trigger that fires whenever a user visits your pages.
Save and Activate your tag by clicking the blue save button and then the blue submit button; both located in the top right corner of the screen. You will have the option to “Publish and Create Version” or “Create Version”; the first will launch the tag onto all of your site pages, the second will save the tag without launching it yet.
If launched, the tag should appear in your “Version Summary” report.
Organise your tags by adding a name and a description; to differentiate between them and understand their purpose at a glance.
Helpful Tip: Tag Manager has an incredibly useful tool known as “Preview Mode”; this tool allows you to browse a website on which your container code is implemented as if it’s already been deployed. This means you can test your container before it is published for any bugs or errors.
The Benefits of using Google Tag manager
With the understanding that Google tag manager doesn’t replace pre-existing analysis tools such as Google Analytics, you might be wondering what the point of using Tag Manager is, and if it’s actually worth the “hassle” of setting up. The fact is, Tag Manager is in my opinion the best supplementary tool to any digital marketer or business owner in gaining additional, invaluable insights into your website’s performance, allowing you to:
Simplifying Data Collection
Unless you’re a seasoned programmer, the vast majority of people find having to deal with code to be a challenging and even overwhelming prospect. Tag Manager vastly simplifies the process of managing, setting up and organising all of the code required to properly monitor website performance across a variety of tools- without having to deal with barely any of the actual code itself. Tag Manager enables you to organise, edit and disable all of the tags you want to use in an easy and efficient manner.
Greater Insights
Tag Manager brings you more depth and more options when it comes to analysing performance, compared to if you were just to use Google Analytics on it’s own. Tag Manager brings you a greater variety of tag types and triggers to bring you data that vanilla Analytics wouldn’t, which in turn presents you with a much greater picture of your website’s overall strengths and weaknesses.
Flexibility & Ease of Use
We’ve mentioned before that Tag Manager is especially useful for marketing agencies and any other teams of people that will be monitoring the performance of multiple sites at a time. This is because Tag Manager gives users different access controls and workspace options to decide who within your team sees what. With these settings, you can control who can make changes to the website, as well as who has access to different websites.
Synergy with Other Tools
Despite being a licensed Google service, Tag Manager allows you to work with a huge amount of other, third party analysis tools. Platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, Adobe Analytics, Hotjar and more are all supported by Google Tag Manager, allowing you the freedom to synergise your analytics with all of your favourite tools. You can even create custom code for any tags you find that don’t have a template in GTM, meaning the options are near limitless.
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