Websites often contain snippets of JavaScript code called “tags” that collect information like behavior data, remarketing data, ecommerce, and more. This makes it easy to send information to products like Google Analytics.
But sometimes, a site can have so many tags, that it becomes cluttered and difficult to manage.
Tagging a site also requires some knowledge of coding, and embedded tags can reduce the speed of your site, or even crash it, if they’re not implemented properly. That’s where Google Tag Manager can help.
With Tag Manager, you no longer have to add tags manually to a website. Instead, you can use Tag Manager to create Google Analytics, AdWords, or any third-party tags, and specify when they should fire. This simplifies and speeds up the process of tag deployment, and can really streamline tag loading for faster website performance. It can also help you manage different versions of your tags, making you less reliant on developers for changes.
Course Overview
This course will walk you through the basics of Tag Manager including developing a measurement plan and a tag management strategy. We’ll discuss how to deploy tags and triggers, and show you how to set up variables that can be reused across your site.
We’ll also discuss how you can use the Data Layer, along with variables and events, to pass information from your website into other tools for marketing and analysis.
Finally, we’ll use Tag Manager to set up advertising and remarketing tags. While the course examples will focus on Tag Manager for desktop, the same principles can apply for mobile apps, as well.
We’ll use tagging examples from The Great Outdoors - the world’s leading fictitious retailer of outdoor camping and hiking equipment, sporting goods, and clothing. In addition to their online and retail stores, The Great Outdoors recently launched a new travel website called “The Great Outdoors Travel Adventures.”
This is a site where customers can research and plan travel, as well as book airline tickets and hotel accommodations.The Great Outdoors will need your help using Google Tag Manager to add tags to their Travel Adventures website, and collect data to better understand customer behavior.
We’re really excited you’re able to join us for this latest Analytics Academy course and we look forward to your participation!
Business Objective
Drive additional Great Outdoors revenue through travel bookings.
Strategy
Offer a website called “Great Outdoors Travel Adventures” where customers can research, plan, and book outdoor travel adventures.
When implementing Google Tag Manager, you’ll want to begin with a solid measurement plan for your business. Let’s look at The Great Outdoors’ measurement plan which includes their business objective and tactics, as well as which metrics and dimensions will be used for measurement and analysis.
Click on the text of the measurement plan below to reveal more insight into the tactics, key performance indicators, and segments we'll use:
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How to develop a tag implementation strategy
When developing a tag implementation strategy, we recommend the following steps:
- First, decide which of your existing site tags you can more effectively manage in Tag Manager. If possible, we recommend migrating all of your tags in order to manage everything in one place and avoid extra code changes to your website.
- Next, decide what static and dynamic values you’ll want to pass from your website. This could be user data, revenue, booking data, or any other custom information you’ll need to understand user behavior. It’s helpful to think of these in terms of “events” (or user actions) that you want to be able to capture using Tag Manager.
- Finally, figure out which tags can supply you with the data you need based on the metrics and dimensions in your measurement plan. Your data requirements should map back to your overall business goals, so you know you’re analyzing the appropriate data.
For example, The Great Outdoors’ measurement plan requires tracking metrics such as:
- Users and Sessions
- Revenue
- the Average Value of visitors and trips purchased
- and Booking Conversion Rate
We’ll also want to be able to analyze those metrics using different dimensions such as:
- Traffic Sources
- Customer Type
- Trip Category
- and Trip Location
To collect these metrics and dimensions, we’ll first use Tag Manager to install The Great Outdoors' Google Analytics “Page View” tag on every page. Additionally, we can track The Great Outdoors' traffic sources using the AdWords conversion tracking tag. We can also target advertising to users that previously visited the Travel Adventures site using the AdWords Remarketing tag.
Developing a tag implementation plan can help you easily figure out what tags to put in Tag Manager, and what data to pass from those tags for marketing and analysis.
How Tag Manager works
The structure of Google Tag Manager
To begin using Tag Manager, you’ll place some JavaScript code called a “container snippet” on each page of your website.
You can then add, delete, or make changes to tags using Tag Manager to publish them to the container snippet, instead of making manual changes to the site code itself. When users visit your website, the container snippet will trigger tags based on firing instructions you’ve set up in Tag Manager, and communicate any data you’ve specified back to other systems such as Google Analytics.
Let’s take a look at how Tag Manager is structured.
Google Tag Manager administration happens at the account level, which allows you to manage tags for one or more websites. Typically, you’ll only need one Tag Manager account per company or organization. But, if you manage website tracking for several companies, you can connect multiple Tag Manager accounts to a single user’s Google account.
For example, if an agency manages tags on behalf of an advertiser such as The Great Outdoors, The Great Outdoorsshould create the Tag Manager account and grant the agency access. Multiple users can also manage the same Tag Manager account, and each user can be granted different access permissions by account administrators.
Containers and Triggers
Each Tag Manager account has at least one container. A container includes the tags and “triggers” that determine when those tags should fire or collect data. For example, a container may include a tag that communicates when users have made a purchase with a trigger that instructs the tag not to fire until a thank-you page comes up and a transaction is complete. Typically, you’ll have one container for each website domain, though you can use a single container for cross-domain tracking.
Triggers are made up of variables, operators, and values.
Variables are placeholders for values that you define. There are two kinds of variables: built-in variables and user-defined variables. Built-in variables such as
{{page path}} or {{click id}} have already been configured for you in Tag Manager, and you simply have to select them, in order to activate them.
User-defined variables are custom variables that you can create, such as
{{purchaseComplete}} , to capture when a transaction has been made. When creating a user-defined variable, you can choose from variable types that can help you collect different kinds of data or create reusable strings that can be used throughout your website.
Operators define the relationship between the variable and the value that must be true in order for a trigger to fire. An operator could be something like “equals,” “contains,” or “doesn’t contain”. For example, if you only wanted a tag to fire when a user completed a transaction, you might set up a tag trigger that fires when the variable
{{url}} equals the value of your checkout page “checkout.html”. You can also set up multiple triggers that must all be true before a tag will fire.
Triggers fire tags in response to events, which are any website actions taken by the user.
You can set triggers in response to simple events such as a page loading, or you can set custom event tags that fire in response to specific actions like when a user clicks on a submit button for a form. Each tag must have at least one trigger in order to fire and all triggers are initiated by website events.
Triggers, variables, and events in Tag Manager let you control when tags fire in response to specific user actions. This can help you customize the way that tags work with your website and enable you to collect valuable marketing information.
