Introduction to Google Tag Manager
Credit: Medium.com
What is GTM and what are the benefits?
Google Tag Manager is a free marketing tool from Google that allows you to keep all tracking codes in one place, making maintenance easier.
Business owners or marketers may not have coding experience or limited access to a development team. Google Tag Manager makes it easy to edit or add code without a developer.
It is often used to integrate websites, or mobile apps, with other platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, TikTok pixel, Google Ads, or LinkedIn. It is a powerful way to centralize tracking, get more accurate conversion data, and give better insights into the behaviors happening on ad platforms and websites.
How does it work?
Tags (small pieces of code) can be set up to trigger based on certain events. You can create variables (a symbol in the code that shows that the value will change) that help make data collection easier. One example of a variable used is in e-commerce tracking, where the variable can be price, tax, or even shipping costs.
Another example is tracking add-to-cart clicks. A tag can be set to fire based on a click to a specific event i.e. add-to-cart button click.
How to install GTM
It’s really simple to get started with Google Tag Manager. Go to this link to get started for free.
Input details such as your account name, country, container, and target platform. A container refers to a grouping of tags related to a platform. An account can have multiple containers for websites or mobile applications.
After creating and accepting the Terms of Service, you will be given some code snippets to install on your website.
First, you will need to access your website’s HTML and paste the code in the <head> tag. Second, you will need to paste the <noscript> code after the <body> tag.
Here’s an example of how to identify a <head> and <body> tag on your website’s HTML.
Once this is done, you are set to start tagging!
How to set up Google Analytics on Google Tag Manager
One of the more common and useful integrations is to connect Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager. As outlined in the previous section, it allows you to track more advanced behaviors such as scrolls, video views, and button clicks on your website without manually coding each page.
Here are the steps you can take to link both together.
1. From your Google Tag Manager, go to Tags. Click ‘New’
2. Name your tag and under tag configuration, choose ‘Google Analytics: Universal Analytics’.
3. Under Track Type, choose ‘Page View’.
4. Under Google Settings Variable, select ‘New Variable’. Here you will be asked to enter your Google Analytics Tracking ID. See how to find your Tracking ID here.