Archive for September, 2014

Google Tag Manager: What is it and why do I need it?

September 23rd, 2014 by Trevor Robinson

Google Tag Manager (‘GTM’) is a free tag managing solution that enables website owners and marketing teams to have more control over the manner in which web traffic and visitor actions are measured throughout their websites, and allows consolidation of tracking across Google Analytics, Adwords, Remarketing, together with 3rd Party Vendors such as ClickTail. A tag is a snippet of code that can be used to measure website traffic and help analyse and identify your website visitors and their on-site behaviourial patterns. Tagging, when implemented well can yield powerful data to gauge the overall performance of your website and marketing efforts.

Whilst GTM was introduced by Google in 2012, it is really only recently that marketers and webmasters have started to take advantage of what it can offer. Once the single code snippet for GTM is added to your website, all of your tags can then be managed from GTM’s admin panel.

The Benefits of GTM

  • Efficiency – One of the most beneficial aspects of the Google Tag Manager from a website owner or marketers standpoint is efficiency.  Now that you can add, edit and test website tags directly through the GTM user interface, you will save both time and money as you won’t need to contact your developer each time a tag needs to be edited or added.
  • Enhanced tag management – As mentioned earlier, multiple website tags can really complicate the tag management process (especially if they are from different platforms or vendors). GTM allows you to view, edit and add tags through the GTM interface quickly and easily all from the one platform.
  • Event listeners – Tracking user interaction such as clicks, PDF downloads and form submissions is excitingly simple to accomplish with Google Tag Manager. Event listeners eliminate the need to manually tag each user interaction that you would like to track. Through the GTM admin panel, you can target links or buttons by attributes that are already contained in the link such as an id, class or URL.
  • Testing and debugging – It’s always been good practice to ensure that your tags are firing (working) before they are published on the web. GTM comes with a built-in debugging window where you can test any tag changes on your website before they are published on your website.

While GTM empowers website owners and marketers with greater control and flexibility, development teams are also positively affected as they are able to focus on the more complex and technically demanding tasks.

We recommend watching the GTM introductory video created by Google which may give you a better visual understanding as to what the tag manager is and how it can help your business.

We have recently implemented the Google Tag Manager for the Contact Point website and can confirm that there is a learning curve to understand how to use GTM. However, it will be worth the investment if the data it provides is analysed, and the insights gained from the analysis drive changes to the structure and functionality of your website. Changes made to your website as a result of your insights can then be very quickly monitored for the impact they are having on your metrics.

We particularly see that the GTM will be beneficial for eCommerce websites as it will allow webmasters to analyse behaviours such as:

  1. Sharing of product information in social media
  2. Clicking through to subscribe to your newsletter from a particular page
  3. Accessing online chat
  4. Customer Reviews emanating from follow up email
  5. Adding an item to your wish list
  6. Ascribing behaviours to the logged in user ID

Please get in touch with us for more information on Google’s Tag Manager or for any assistance with initial implementation.

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