I stumbled across Google Tag Manager (GTM) while I was searching for a solution to a Google Analytics (GA) problem, and it intrigued me because the answer seemed too simple. Once I dove into GTM it continued to solve one marketing problem after another giving me the tools to make the impossible simply possible.
GTM is a FREE product that manages all of your snippets or code called “tags.” Tags can be anything from conversion pixels from social media, custom CSS code to change text or colors, to allowing popups or customer interaction bubbles.
These tags are executed by “triggers” which define when and where to execute them. Triggers are limitless and give you a lot of flexibility for when and where you want to tack your events on GA. The information used in tags and triggers are stored in “variables.”
GTM gives you a unique ability to use these three tools to customize anything and everything for events to experience. As you will see GTM allows you to surpass the boundaries set by your environment to become a marketing ninja.
Why Use GTM?
In our line of work we deal with many clients. These clients have websites that vary drastically from custom built websites, to every flavor of CMS under the sun. Not only do the website setups differ, but how the clients safeguard their websites varies. GTM completely eliminates so many of the learning curves, communication delays, and other holdups in code changing processes.
If you have ever tried to create events for GA to track you’ve had to dive into source code to do it. Or, if you’ve needed to change an event for multiple pages you may have had to change it in each page, again changing source code. To streamline event tracking and updating to one dashboard, GTM has you covered.
In addition to events you have social pixels to place on each page. With all of the pixels and snippets on your website, it can become a page loading nightmare. GTM can take your Twitter, Facebook, Analytics, AdWords, and any other snippet you may have and fuse them all into one snippet to place onto your website.
Just take a look at all of the tags that GTM supports natively, not to mention the custom HTML you can make appear through GTM.
How Will GTM Transform You?
Marketers need to be able to make changes quickly and effectively and track results in order to show their worth. By combining your current tools with GTM you will be able to test, analyze, report, and accomplish results in a way you probably didn’t think possible.
Over the next posts I will be showing you how to:
- Combine your pixels and snippets with GTM
- Listen in on and track events without your web development team
- Track your users through cookies and exits
- And much more!
Do you use GTM? Let me know in the comments below.
Much success,
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