Google Tag Manager (GTM) Overview

Google Tag Manager (or GTM) is probably the most used Tag Management System (TMS). This article will give you an overview to the tool and why it should be used instead of hard-coding web analytics* code snippets on your website.

 

* Web Analytics platforms are the universe of all tools that will be can be used for collecting/analyzing user behavior traffic information from a website. e.g. Google Analytics (Site analytics), Google AdWords (Marketing platforms) etc.

 

What is Google Tag Manager?

Google Tag Manager acts as a middle man between the website and the different web analytics platforms. Every web analytics platform will provide its own code snippet(s) that needs to be placed on the website. There are 2 ways these code-snippets can be implemented:

  1. Hard-code the code snippets

  2. Use a Tag Manager

 

Hard-code the code snippets

  • This would now involve the development team (and its deployment schedule) in the web analytics implementation life-cycle.

  • There might be no feasible way for the analytics team to perform positive & negative testing to ensure code snippets are firing only at the intended location

  • Minor modifications could also take a longer time to deploy.

Use a Tag Manager

  • The development team only needs to place the GTM code snippet on all the pages of the website. Once the GTM snippet is placed, all web analytics code snippets can be implemented via the GTM user interface

  • No (or minimal) work will be required by the development team for day-to-day tasks.

  • A standardized process for implementation and testing can be established.

 

Create Google Tag Manager container for your website

1. Go to the GTM interface link

2. Click on 'Create Account'

Create GTM 1.png

 

 

3. Fill in the required Account details in 'Account Setup'

4. In 'Container Setup', the container name will be the name of the website. In most cases, it is always recommended to maintain a single GTM container per website.

5. For the purpose of this article we will select 'Web' as our GTM container will be used for desktop and mobile web pages.

 

How to install Google Tag Manager on your website

1. After creating the GTM Container, click on the GTM container ID on the top right of the interface

How to install GTM 1.png

2. Follow the instructions and paste the provided code snippets at the appropriate locations

How to install GTM 2.png

NOTE - CMS platforms such as Wix, Wordpress, Squarespace etc. already have integrations available for Google Tag Manager. In such cases, these existing integrations can be leveraged. Please refer to the help documents for your respective CMS system for more information.

To learn more about the various GTM components click here

GTMDevrath SampatGTM, Tools, Site AnalyticsComment