What is Google Tag Manager? A Beginner’s (Gentle) Introduction and Review!

One day in a moment of frustration, John Wanamaker (1838–1922), a successful American merchant and department store owner, threw his hands in the air and sighed,

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,”

This famous statement still haunts marketers up to this day as they seek management (and board) approval for bigger marketing budgets.

Throwing Spaghetti at the Wall

During Wanamaker’s time. All marketers could only do was throw Spaghetti at the wall and hope for the best.

There was no way to attribute sales and revenue (or lack thereof) to any specific advertising campaign hence Wanamaker’s despair.

The Era of Data Driven Marketing

Almost a Century after John Wanamaker’s passing. We now have Google Analytics and the ability to track everything that is done online (and offline through measurement protocol)

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram allow marketers to advertise and sell to segmented groups of people with laser focused accuracy.

Powering this hyper-focused marketing train is data. Cold hard data

With a single piece of tracking code. Google Analytics allows marketers, webmasters and developers to collect data associated with page views, sessions, visitor geographical information and so forth.

But there is a problem.

To go further than the basic page view and session view data that a vanilla Google Analytics installation provides. You almost always need to deploy additional tracking code on every page.

For example, say someone wants to track for how long a website visitor watched a video before pausing and restarting the video again.

An additional snippet of tracking code is needed for that

Want to see how often visitors interact with a particular widget on a certain section of your website? Again you need to deploy another piece of tracking code for that...

And you can already see where things are going.

For starters

1. The majority of people (for lack of time or coding skills) would often need to ask a developer to do it for them and developers charge money. Lots of it.
2. And asking someone to help means waiting for that person to help whenever it’s convenient for them which equals to time wasted. And time=money
3. Because tracking those special/unique interactions requires tracking code to be installed on every page. It means there is a high chance of installing the same tracking code twice or thrice. In other words, there is an opportunity for disorganization and confusion

Enter Google Tag Manager

To summarize the role of Google Tag Manager, here is what respected Google analytics expert, Chris Mercer, says in his Google Tag Manager for Beginners Course at CXL Institute

“When it comes to working with data, you’re limited by the amount of data available, Google Tag Manager allows you to expand the amount of data that you can collect, because it gives you greater visibility into the specific actions that are happening on various websites.”

In other words, Google Tag Manager solves some of the problems that come with Google Analytics i.e

1. Better Organization: Tag Manager stores all snippets of tracking code in one centralized place (called a container) which is far cleaner while also eliminating the risk of duplicate tracking.
2. No need to hire developers: With Tag Manager, deploying a new snippet of tracking code is simple and most people won’t no need to hire a developer just because of how simple and straightforward Tag Manager makes the process.
3. Super-fast deployment: Rather than waiting for a developer to open a free slot to help with analytics tracking. Tag deployment in Google Tag Manager can be achieved in a matter of minutes without needing help fro a developer.
4. Testing mode: Google Tag Manager comes with ‘preview mode’ which acts like a sort of staging sandbox to test and make sure your new code is working correctly before launch.

Elements of Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is made up of components such as Triggers and Tags. There are also elements such as Variables and the Data Layer which we’ll not cover in this article.

1. Triggers: As the name suggests, triggers sort of lie in wait and listen for certain events on a page to happen e.g clicks, form submissions or downloads before they (the triggers) kick-in and prompt Tags to fire in response.
2. Tags: Tags fire in response to associated triggers. Just like in the example above, a trigger for a successful form submission is waken up by that successful form submission and it ‘alerts’ the ‘ successful form submission tag’ to fire and record that activity which is then sent to Google Analytics-sorry for the Spy movie analogy:)

What is the difference between Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Think of Google Tag Manager like a depot or hub that receives goods or documentation, temporarily stores those goods and then sends them to different places for further processing.

Google Tag Manager records custom events on a website, packages and temporarily stores that information and then sends it to platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, and many other 3rd party tracking apps for further processing.

Google Analytics is more like a warehouse and less of a depot. Google Analytics tracks websites but then it stores that information (for much, much longer periods) to be presented in the form of Google Analytics reports.

Frequently Asked Questions about Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager

Question: If I have both GA (Google Analytics) and GTM (Google Tag Manager) installed, am I going to experience duplication of information?

Answer: Yes

Question: How do you migrate a website that uses old Google Analytics code to Google Tag Manager?

Answer: The process is not straightforward and simple. But you can begin by replicating hard coded GA tracking code into a Google Tag Manager to container. Publish the new GTM tags and remove the old, hard coded GA tracking code. In some cases you could keep both instances of GA and GTM running, GA will report on the main site while GTM will send information to a test site.

Learn Google Tag Manager

There are lots of wonderful folks and brilliant minds that teach Google Analytics for free, Simo Ahava being one of them.

But if you want to learn Google Tag Manager and Digital Analytics and gain a recognized certificate from a reputable organization, then CXL Institute is the way to go.

I am also studying Digital Analytics through CXL Institute and most of what I wrote I have learned through the CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree.

To learn more and become a better Digital Analyst with killer Google Tag manager skills click here for Digital Analytics and here for Google Tag Manager (non affiliate links)