By now, you\’ve probably heard about Google\’s Tag Manager (GTM). If you\’ve been highly involved in your website\’s marketing strategy and efforts, you\’ve probably read about it in passing, and may have even read a few articles about it. You may be clear on what it is, or maybe not! So, what is it?
Simply put, GTM is a free tool that generates tags/labels for a website with a single piece of code and allows you to manage everything from a single interface. It\’s a way for web marketers and site owners to manage tags and labels easily and conveniently.
Sure, that sounds simple. But what is a tag?
A tag is a piece of code embedded on your site to track a variety of things such as conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and other marketing related data that site owners and marketers would like to track. For example, if you want to see how many people have booked a particular tour versus the number of people visiting a site, a tag would make it easy to track that data.
Google Tag Manager provides us the ability to generate dynamic tags, which are easy to manipulate, manage, monitor and update quickly and safely. With this, we can streamline the processes, reduce the number of errors and in some cases, avoid the services of a Webmaster.
The purpose is simple, reduce execution times or development of each site to devote the longest possible time to generate results; Visits, customers and sales.
Benefits of using Google Tag Manager
Improves site performance: The execution of each tag built into the site runs asynchronously, so it does not affect the upload speed. In addition, you only need to integrate a single container of Google Tag Manager to link your Google Analytics account, Awards or any other third party tag.
Cleaner code: When it is necessary to measure links or buttons it is not necessary to go directly to the code of our site to implement this functionality, it is enough to create labels.
Version control: full control of the integrated tags or published within a certain portal, so if you modify a label causes an error, you can always go back to an earlier version to correct errors.
Easy integration with Google and third-party products: In addition to the products available from Google, you can integrate third-party tags like DoubleClick or Floodlight
Streamlines production processes: Avoids the need to use the services of a webmaster and allows you to deploy tags on your website quickly.
Helps to reduce errors: If for some reason when updating a label do not get the results you want or just reload it incorrectly, you can always return to a previous version.
Tag Management: Google Tag Manager is an administration panel where we can always see all tags that are published so that we can manage each of them and avoid duplicate labels.
Provides a bird\’s eye view: When we try to implement pieces of code on our website to track particular data sets, there comes a time when it becomes really hard to keep track of it all. The advantage of GTM simplifies this by having one place to organize track and manage all these snippets of code.
The benefits offered by the Google Tag Manager are huge for any type of company; big or small. Helps reduce development or execution times of a website to focus as long as possible on the acquisition of customers and generate sales through the Internet.
How to set up Google Tag Manager
- First, we need to create an account tagmanager.google.com
- Create a container fragment and implement it on all pages of the website.
- Map the website, thinking about the pages in which should be activated each label that we will use in it.
- Create labels, rules, etc. According to the mapping, we did previously.
- Test the changes with the tool Debugging and Preview
- Activate the changes made and remove all the tags that we used previously on the website.
Clearly, Google is looking to increasingly integrate its different products into a single platform and with Tag Manager, it really helps to simplify a lot of the work to be done.
Google Tag Manager best practices
- Configure your GTM account properly with its five basic elements: Account, container, tags, triggers and variables.
- Use decent naming resolutions for GTM configurations. It\’s best to use your company’s website name or company name and the function or action you\’re trying to track.
- Provide GTM access to the proper administrators to avoid the risk of breaking down the functionality of your website.
- Construct and follow the instructions and processes of tag deployment to minimize the risks of IT resources.
- Never do double tagging. This will give you false analytics data!
- Test your tags each time before deployment to ensure the appearance and functionality of your website are perfect.
- Outsource tag deployment when you are not firm about GTM installation/debugging and/or use of macros/data layers.
Using GTM in conjunction with Google Analytics and other tools
There are some ways to use Google Tag Manager conjoining with Google Analytics that are ordinary and very straightforward. For example, we can use GTM to send different pieces of data into Google Analytics such as events and pageviews. Usually, you can do this with some Javascripting, but GTM eliminates that need.
The same can be done with third-party products such as Crazy Egg, DoubleClick and Facebook Pixel.