Google Tag Manager – why you need to set this up for your website analytics -

*Snapshot from Chris Mercer’s Google Tag Manager for Beginners course: what it looks like from Welcome page to Content page to Thank You page with Google Tags and Triggers*

Google Tag Manager – or GTM – is one of the things you need to set up if you want to gain a deeper understanding of your website’s analytics. It works hand in hand with Google Analytics where GTM collects the data while Google Analytics stores and presents them to you in a way you structure it to.

Chris “Mercer” Mercer of Measurementmarketing.io describes this relationship as:

Google Tag Manager can also collect and send data to third-party platforms that store and report information, like Facebook Insights:

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google describes Google Tag Manager as:

… a tag management system (TMS) that allows you to quickly and easily update measurement codes and related code fragments collectively known as tags on your website or mobile app. Once the small segment of Tag Manager code has been added to your project, you can safely and easily deploy analytics and measurement tag configurations from a web-based user interface.

Google Tag Manager gives you visibility on the various behaviours happening on your site. Are people watching your videos? How far down your landing page do they scroll (do they scroll ‘til the end and get to your sign up box)? Which links do they click – and do they click on your link images or text? Which e-Commerce transactions have your visitors engaged with?

The best thing about Tag Managers is that you can “train” them. If you want to know whether website visitors play one of your sales videos onsite but end up not buying, then you can train GTM to fire a pixel off to Facebook so you can re-target this group of people on Facebook or Google Ads, eventually warming them up to your products or services.

If you want to know when somebody purchases and lands on your “Thank You” page, you can train GTM to collect all the details behind this transaction. You can then ask it to pass that information over to Google Analytics, then fire a Facebook pixel or Google Ads for remarketing.

Say someone buys a Paris tour package in a travel agency’s website. GTM can collect data behind the website visitor and everything linked in this e-Commerce transaction. These data you can then see reflected on Google Analytics and/or use to remarket a Versailles tour package on Facebook and Google ads.

Google Tag Manager has A LOT of third-party integrations. You can integrate scripts from PayPal, Infusionsoft, Hotjar, Facebook pixels – name it! You can find the whole list of integrations here and here.

What are the key elements of Google Tag Manager?

There are four key things that you need to know to be able to set up a system of tags properly.

Triggers

Triggers tell the “when.”

It’s the condition that you want Google Tag Manager to fire.

Set up triggers to tell GTM when to take an action. By defining the triggers, you tell GTM to fire an action when a visitor, for instance, views a certain page or clicks a URL.

Here’s a snapshot of what the available triggers are like:

Variables

Variables tell the “where” to fire the tag.

It provides the specific information that Google Tag Manager needs to do its job.

There are built-in variables and user-defined variables. Here are examples of the built-in variable types:

And here are some built-in variables:

Data Layer

Google describes Data Layer as follows:

Google Tag Manager functions best when deployed alongside a data layer. A data layer is a JavaScript object that is used to pass information from your website to your Tag Manager container. You can then use that information to populate variables and activate triggers in your tag configurations.

The way Mercer describes it in the course is a virtual filing cabinet:

Sometimes as you’re going through Tag Manager and as different behaviors are happening, you need to be able to temporarily store those details somewhere so that you can reference them later. For example, an e-commerce transaction. You want to be able to store the details of the e-commerce transaction long enough so that you can send them to all the different platforms that need to know about those different details. The way that I really think about the data layer in my head is this. It’s a little virtual filing cabinet.

Just like in an actual filing cabinet, you have a folder and you’ve got the contents of the folder. It’s kind of the same thing. So, in this case, it’s the key, and what the value of the key is.

For instance:

Read more about Data Layer here: https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/6164391?hl=en

What can be done on Google Tag Manager

Now here are the things that knocked my socks off about Google Tag Manager. Make sure you’re sitting down while going over below!

Track Engagement with Clicks

Did you know that you have a way to find out which links your visitors are clicking – and when?

We have Google Tag Manager to thank for this. This kind of engagement tracking is especially helpful when knowing which types of links your visitors are more inclined to click. For instance, if you offer monthly and annual rates for a subscription product (think Grammarly or the paid online magazine subscriptions for instance), you will know whether people tend to explore more of the monthly vs annually. Or if you want to optimize your landing page, you will know if users tend to click on images vs texts.

So you’ll know how it all works, I’ll let this video do the talking:

Track Engagement with Timers

This is my personal favorite. By setting tags on GTM, you will be able to know whether visitors engage in 5, 10, 15 seconds (or however long you want to find out). You’ll also know what kind of engagement they tend to do in x seconds). For instance, GTM will tell you whether a visitor clicks within 20 seconds, and how many times they do it.

Here’s a video explaining how it works:

Track Engagement with Scrolls

You can also track how far down your website visitor scrolls through a certain page. For instance, if you have a landing page that is ridiculously long, you will find out how patient your visitors are in going through the whole thing (or not). This is especially helpful when you have a call-to-action at the bottom of the page and you want to know whether most users even get to it or not. If yes but you’re still not getting enough clicks on your call-to-action, then you can decide to make improvements on your landing page or actual offering. This is just an example of an insight you can get from Google Tag Manager.

Here’s a video explaining how it works:

Track Engagement with YouTube videos

If you have a YouTube video embedded in your website, there’s also a way for you to know how much of the video your visitor watches or if they click any link within it. You can also learn if they pause the video, which parts, how often, etc.

Here’s how it works:

What’s next

Hope you enjoyed this article! If you have a website and have already set up Google Analytics, I suggest you also set up Google Tag Manager and have a go at creating your own tags. Feel free to explore the platform as it’s really useful in diving deep into the behaviors on your website and other channels. It may look overwhelming at first, but just keep exploring it and you’ll eventually get the hang of it. I’ll also be doing the same with my website (yes the one you’re reading right now).

If you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll try my best to answer them! You can also email me@tinasendin.com or connect with me on LinkedIn!

Let’s learn Google Tag Manager together!

This article is also just really scratching the surface of what GTM can provide you in terms of information and insights about your website. Credits to CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree and Chris Mercer of MarketingMeasurement.io for some of the snapshots in this article.

I suggest you dive deeper into it and learn more about growth marketing. Here are some articles that you may find equally interesting:

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Google Tag Manager – why you need to set this up for your website analytics