Google Tag Manager (GTM) Components

Google Tag Manager (or GTM) is probably the most used among the various Tag Management Systems (TMS). This article will give you a detailed introduction to the tool and how to leverage its functionalities.

 

Click here if you need an overview on What is Google Tag Manager.

 

Google Tag Manager components

Google Tag Manager can be broken down into 3 essential components:

  1. Tags (a.k.a 'What?')

  2. Triggers (a.k.a 'Where?')

  3. Variables (a.k.a 'Supporting Cast')

 

Tags

A good analogy for tags would be 'What needs to fire'. Using GTM 'Tags', code snippets from numerous web analytics platforms (e.g. Google Analytics, AdWords, Bing etc.) can be implemented.

 

GTM also has a ready set of in-built tag templates for most of the major analytics platforms. Using these templates, the analytics team can implement and customize the tags easily without the hassle of understanding code. One more advantage of leveraging tag templates is that Google/Vendor is responsible for maintaining the latest (or at least functional) version of these vendor templates . What does this mean - If Google Analytics decides to update its code library and has a new syntax, it is very unlikely that any changes would need to be made in GTM. On the other hand, if these code snippets were hard-coded on the website, modifications would be required to those code-snippets.

 

Triggers

Triggers are nothing but the firing logic for each tag i.e. 'Where' the tag needs to fire. GTM has a vast set of templates for the triggers most used. 3 of the most used triggers are:

  1. Page View - Used when a tag is supposed to fire on load of a page

  2. Click (All Elements or Links) - Used when a tag is supposed to fire on click of any element on the page OR the click of links on the page

  3. Custom Events (dataLayer) - This is an advanced version of triggers. We will be covering this in detail in future articles. This is usually used in cases where #1 and #2 cannot be used. For e.g. - Many form builder platforms these days show a thank you modal pop-up when a user has submitted the form. The standard "Page View" trigger cannot be used as there is no new thank you page load and the "Click" trigger cannot be used as clicking the "Submit" button does not ensure that the user has submitted the form without encountering any errors. In this case, we provide the web developers with a dataLayer code (nothing but a javascript with standard syntax) that they need to place on load of the modal thank-you pop up. The GTM "Custom Event" trigger will automatically fire the tag when that dataLayer code has been executed.

GTM also provides the flexibility to execute more than one firing rules in triggers as well (e.g. Fire only on buttons with a specific text, fire only on certain pages etc.)

 

 

Variables

If you have some experience with programming, the concept of variables in code is very similar to GTM variables. 'Variables' are re-usable values that are applied to 'Tags' and 'Triggers' to maintain consistency in logic. For e.g. On the purchase confirmation page, the transaction value can be stored in a single variable which can be used in multiple tags. This would ensure consistency in values being passed into all platforms.

 

GTM has 2 types of variables:

  1. In-built - Already existing in GTM. Few examples of often used variables: - Page URL: Will return the URL of the page the user is on - Click text: Will return the text that the user has clicked

  2. User-defined: User created & maintained for basic/advanced cases. Few examples: - Custom JavaScript: Will execute JavaScript on the page and return computed value - Lookup table: Will execute the if-else logic on a variable to determine value to return

Future articles will contain in-depth guides on all these individual components.

GTMDevrath SampatGTM, Site Analytics1 Comment