Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a tool that accompanies Google Analytics to allow you to setup (among other things) conversion tracking without ever having to edit your website files.
As always, the decision to adopt any new software innovation should start with a serious conversation about how it can be used to improve a particular aspect of the business. How will it improve the company’s ability to make informed decisions on improving the website’s capacity to attract and convert leads?
Yes, we all want to improve conversions, but not at a high cost or with an added burden of complexity. Well, fortunately GTM is free and relatively easy!
Do you want to really start learning how people use your website? Us too!
So, um, What are Tags?
Tags, as they are referred to by this manager thing, are snippets of code that allow you to track, measure and influence the website in many different ways.
A tag manger is a centralized interface that manages all of your tags in one wonderfully simple location. Tags like Google Analytics (and every imaginable event tracker), AdWords, e-commerce tracking, etc… It’s like a magic tunnel into your website without ever having to touch the code.
To GTM or not to GTM?
Try answering these questions to see if a Google Tag Manager implementation is something you might want to look into:
- Would you like to know how many people are clicking on a particular button or link on your homepage?
- Would you like to know if more people click on the image, title or the ‘learn more’ text on your content features?
- Are you looking to learn how people really interact with your content, as opposed to which pages they are simply looking at?
- And you want to be able to do all this and more without having to pay a dime or touch the website code!
If you answered ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’ to any of the above, then you really are a good candidate for GTM. Let’s talk.
The High-Level Lowdown
As mentioned, this article is intended to be more of an introduction to Google Tag Manager without all of the deep, techno, mumbo-jumbo of in-depth how-to’s and tutorials. By the end of this read you should be able to answer the question; Is GTM right for my business?
Okay, but why should I use it again?
Consider the following scenarios:
- Your website has Google Analytics (GA) installed and everything is running great. Your developer adds the code to the site template which appears on every page; as it should.
- You or your marketing team needs to know how many people downloaded your new amazing whitepaper. Unfortunately, GA doesn’t record this by default, so your developer must add some custom code to the site template, and that also loads on every page of the website. GA doesn’t allow you to specify when to present the tracking code, so even though your whitepaper is a single page, this new code is forced to run everywhere.
- Then you decide that you wish to know who is clicking the ‘ask for help’ button at the top of the website. But more importantly, which page was the visitor on when they decided to click the button? This can give your team excellent information on which pages could use some content improvement. Once again, your development team must edit the website code (first on staging for testing, then replicate the updates to the live website). A time-consuming process that is out of your control.
- Lastly, you have an emerging blog and you want to improve the click-through from the list page. You would like information on whether people prefer to click on the teaser image, the blog title or the ‘read more’ link when selecting the article. As before, when tracking events in the traditional Google Analytics code, your developer must once again, add more code to the template and then more code on the various elements (image, heading, link) in order to ‘tag’ them for GA to know how to label the events or goals.
These are all hugely important for learning about your visitors and improving the experience of the website which ultimately will lead to increased leads and sales; guaranteed.
One Code Snippet, Hundreds of Options.
Tag Manager uses a single piece of code placed into the website template. That’s it. All of the customization, additional tracking and management occur outside of the website in the GTM tool interface. It’s like changing your car tires without ever touching the vehicle. Yes, it’s that profound.
But wait, there’s more.
Tag Manager can be configured to display (fire) your new tracking code on specific pages without ever touching the website. In the example above you simply specify to GTM that you wish the Whitepaper download tracker to only ‘fire’ on the Whitepaper page. The code listens for the right page and stuffs the tracking code without bogging down the rest of the website. Super amazing.
Here’s a very simple example of what your tag interface might look like with 2 additional events for measuring clicks on a Book Online button and a Phone number link.
Instantly setup your click tracking to fuel your content optimization efforts without ever needing to wait for a developer.
Does this sound interesting? Would you like us to help you decide whether Google Tag Manager is a good fit for your business? It may not be, but let’s take a minute to learn about how you can improve the lead generating capabilities of your website.
Contact us Here or call us at 250.598.6772.