3 Reasons Why You Should Use Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager was first introduced in 2012 and still, to this day, is the most powerful analytics tag management system for websites and apps.

Google Analytics is amazing at reporting customer behaviour, acquisition channels, and overall website performance. With some setup, Google Tag Manager can add extra layers of insight that would otherwise be completely unknown by site admins and business owners.

Note: For the purpose of this article, GTM = Google Tag Manager, and GA = Google Analytics.

GTM can do a lot! It’s the strategy of taking what you want to measure, configuring GTM with elements on your website, and feeding all of that data in the form of events to GA.

Basic Tracking

• PDF or file downloads
• CTA button clicks
• Email marketing signups
• Outbound link clicks (i.e. social links in a footer)

Advanced Tracking

• Form abandonment
• Session duration time intervals
• Page scroll depth
• Video percentage watched
• FAQs read

Ecommerce Tracking

• Add to wishlist clicks
• Product impressions
• Category impressions
• Checkout abandonment
• Promo code use

We’re not going to detail how to set up variables, triggers, and tags in GTM because it can be different for every website. But in a nutshell, you:

1. Install a code snippet from GTM on your website
2. Strategize what actions will help support business KPIs
3. Set up and label triggers based on each of the actions you want to track
4. Configure variables for when or what will trigger the event tag(s)
5. Push code updates through GTM and your website
6. Verify and report in GA

If there’s something to click on, fill out, watch, read, or swipe on your website, GTM can provide insight.

A real-world example of this is knowing how many people bail halfway through filling out your contact form or completing a shopping cart process. There’s real revenue attached to these metrics, so wouldn’t it be nice to discover a baseline and create a plan to increase conversions?

Data-driven decision-making means using facts, metrics, and data to guide strategic business decisions.

Let’s say you want to improve customer satisfaction with your SaaS company. You could have a live counter with access to historical data on how many bug/support tickets are coming in. When you review these numbers each quarter, you could see which way the trend is going.

If you were teasing a new product to sell on your ecommerce store, you could gauge user interest by knowing how many times it was added to a wish list before committing to a huge order with a supplier.

Remarketing strategies are great because it gets your brand in front of people that have previously engaged with you. A classic example of remarketing is showing an ad for a product to someone who did not complete each step of the checkout process.

You’ve always been able to remarket to people that view a certain page of your website, but with GTM, you could show someone an ad that watched at least 30 seconds of a company profile video or scrolled to the bottom of a product page.

Nearly everything you can track in GTM and feed to GA can be sent to Google Ads for a campaign.

The easiest way to get started would be to have a quick video meeting with a member of our team to look at the opportunities available on your website.

From there, we can handle the complete setup of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and work with your in-house team to strategize the best site elements to track that directly align with your business’s goals.