Digital marketing thrives on data. Regardless of the kind of site that you have, while it’s a large e-commerce site, your own site, or a site for your business, it’s essential to comprehend how people communicate with your website. Google Analytics may provide a good deal of the vital insights you are searching for, but if used independently, it can have its limitations. But by tagging your site and using Google Tag Manager in conjunction with Google Analytics, you’re able to gather much more data than you’d otherwise be able to.
Tags are snippets of code that are added to a site to get information and send it to third parties. You can use tags for all sorts of purposes, including scroll tracking, tracking sort submissions, monitoring form submissions, generating heat maps, remarketing, or tracking how people arrive at your site. They are also utilized to track certain events like document downloads, clicks on certain links, or items that were removed by a shopping cart..
Sites commonly use many different tags and the amount of code required to generate them all can be pretty overwhelming, especially if you’re attempting to edit or add tags simply by going directly into the website’s source code.
Google Tag Manager a tool with a user friendly, web-based interface that simplifies the procedure for working with tags. Using GTM, you are able to edit, edit, and also disable tags, never having to touch the source code.
While GTM is, of course, a Google product, it’s hardly confined by merely dealing with tags to get additional Google services such as AdWords or Analytics.
You can use it to control numerous third-party tags, for example, Twitter, Bing advertisements, Crazy Egg, and Hotjar, simply to mention a couple. If there is yet another tag which doesn’t have a template at GTM, you may add your custom code.
Aspects of tags & GTM
On the surface, tags and tag managers are fairly straightforward. However, before you can start dealing with them, there are a couple of main concepts you’ll have to know about.
Containers
When you get started working with GTM, the first thing you will have to do is create a container. A container essentially “holds” all the tags for your internet site.
After creating a new container, GTM provides you with some code to add to your website. This is the container and it’s going to have to be inserted into the source code so it displays on each page of your site.
Many CMS’s, such as WordPress, have plugins that will add the container code for you personally; however, you may need to speak to your web developer to have it added. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be ready to add, edit, disable, or remove the tags you need through GTM .
Triggers:
Each tag on a site needs to serve a specific purpose. Maybe you want to have tag send information when someone downloads a file, when an outbound link is clicked, or when a form is submitted. These sorts of events are known as triggers and all tags need to have at least one trigger assigned to it; otherwise, it’s not going to do anything.
Triggers can be broken down into two main components: events and filters. When you go to configure a trigger in GTM, you’ll be given a long list of types of triggers to choose from. These are your events. Once you choose an event, you’ll be able to set up your filter. Filters can be further broken down into three parts: variables, operators, and values.
Variables & constants:
Variables contain the worth a trigger should assess to learn whether or not it should fire. The tag contrasts the value of the variable to this value defined in the cause and should the variable meets the conditions of the cause, the tag will probably fire. Variables can often be reused between tags. One of the most well-known methods for using GTM is to create constant factors together with the ID numbers or tracking codes you’ll need to use more than formerly. For example, if you will need to use your Google Analytics property ID number in multiple tags, then you can just make a constant string variable with the value being your ID number. This way, instead of repeatedly having to look up and enter your ID number, you could just pick the variable name.
Final Thoughts
Google Tag Manager helps make tag management simple, easy and reliable by allowing marketers and webmasters to deploy website tags all in one place. It also useful to improve site loading time.
