For those looking to track the analytics and traffic of their website, look no further than Google Tag Manager. This helpful tool can be used to optimize your online marketing, ensuring that your website is effective and easy to manage.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Rather than adding and editing the tags you're used to seeing in the HTML of your website, Google Tag Manager (GTM) offers the ability to add and edit your website's tags in a quick and easy template, without having to deep dive into the code of your site. Using your Google Tag Account, you can rapidly add, remove, or change the tags of your website, making you agile when it comes to online marketing decisions.
With GTM, you can track user scrolling, form submissions, surveys, heat maps, and how people have arrived at your site. These can also be helpfully implemented to better ensure that your website is getting not only traffic, but quality traffic that is leading to sales and business.
How Does it Differ From Google Analytics?
Your first inclination may be that GTM is a replacement for Google Analytics (GA), but that couldn't be further from the truth. Rather than replacing GA, GTM is used in addition to GA, enhancing it's capabilities to accurately track the traffic on your website. GA uses the tags on your website to track visitor information, and GTM is a way to add and edit those tags, essentially helping GA do its job.
Why Should You Use It?
There are many great reasons to utilize Google Tag Manager, including:
Increases website speed by reducing the amount of heavy code
Limits the reliance on web developers, by allowing you to add these small lines of tracking code to your website yourself
Allowing you to pivot quickly and efficiently
Advanced tag tracking
What Can You Track with GTM?
The sky’s the limit when it comes to what you can track with GTM. You can choose from a number of preset tags such as Google Analytics, Google Ads Retargeting, Google Optimize, Google Surveys, Bing Ads, Marin Software, AdRoll Smart Pixel, Crazy Egg, Criteo OneTag, and many, many more. You can also add custom HTML, so truly anything you want or need to track can be added.
Should You Be Wary?
Though GTM is generally easy to setup and use, it does have its issues. For instance, there are some known tracking issues with it's ties to GA and Facebook Pixel when implemented with Shopify, a commonly used ecommerce software. User error when creating tags can also lead to issues with tracking, and may skew your analytics.
The solution for this known Shopify tracking issue is to simply not place GA and Facebook Pixels in GTM, but still use it for any other tags.
How Do You Get Started?
Getting started is easy, and Google has provided plenty of resources to help you do just that. The following video from Google is a great place to start, and explains some of the benefits of using Google Tag Manager, as well as what's necessary to begin.
If you have questions about how Google Tag Manager can be utilized with your site, as well as how you can increase sales through online marketing, don't hesitate to contact us at Interstellar, and we're more than happy to get you started.