Data is the core of digital marketing. Regardless of your website type, whether it’s a small personal website or giant ecommerce website or a small business web presence, understanding the user interactions is the most significant to thrive your business. Google Analytics can provide some crucial data insights, but it has some limitations when utilized in isolation. When you use Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager, you unlock the potential to collect substantially richer data and valuable insight.
Google Tag Manager provides an updated solution for managing all your website’s tags in a single, user-friendly platform without the requirement of any coding experience and expertise. With Tag Manager it has become very easy to update your own website tags for better conversions, site analytics, and other important metrics that matter most to your business objectives. Besides providing seamlessly integration with Google and third-party tags, Tag Manager does error validation, rapid tag loading to ensure the tags are working properly in any circumstances.
Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics 4
It’s important to recognize that Google Tag Manager is different from Google Analytics. Google Analytics is the tracking tool, which collects, stores and analyse data, while Google Tag Manager is a platform to store and manages third-party code without any reporting or analytical features. It’s just the mediator between website and the tracking tool.
These two tools complement each other impeccably. Therefore, using them together is often most sensible approach, depending on your specific circumstances.
What Exactly Does Google Tag Manager Do?
Data Layer
Data Layer is one of the most significant elements of Google Tag Manager, enabling unparalleled flexibility and straightforward setup. From a technical perspective, it is a JavaScript array, housing data relevant to the tags, triggers, and variables. It also sends important information to other integrated tools like Google Analytics 4 or Google Ads
Containers
Once you initiate your work with GTM, the first step is to create a container, which serves as a repository for all the tags connected with your website.
Once you are done through creating process, GTM provides you a piece of code, which must be inserted into the source code to confirm its presence on each page of your site. Once this task has been accomplished, you are free to conveniently add, modify, deactivate, or remove tags as required via GTM.
Tags
A tag in GTM is snippet of JavaScript that you add to your website to perform specific function. It can be a Google Ads Tag, Google Analytics tag, or Facebook Pixel tag or any other. You can use these tags to track conversions or retarget your visitors. Google Tag Manager features built-in templates for analytics and marketing tools and these templates facilitate effortless tag incorporation. In case you don’t find a specific tag, you want to include in your website, you can opt in to integrate it using a custom HTML tag.
Triggers:
Within GTM, a trigger is a runtime assessment that determines whether a condition is met, resulting in either a true or false outcome.
Google Tag Manager offers a list of trigger types to fire your tag such as Page views, form submissions, and link clicks are some of the common examples of triggers. When a user views a page or clicks an element or a link, the related tag will fire. You need to assign a trigger to every tag so Tag Manager knows when to fire the tag.
- Pageview: fires a tag when a pageview occurs
- All Elements: fire a tag on any clicks of a website
- Just links: fire a tag when a link is clicked
- Button clicks: fires when a button is clicked
- Form Submission: fires a tag when a form is submitted
- Scroll depth: fires when a user scrolls a webpage to a certain depth
- Video: fires a tag when a video is played
- JavaScript Error: fires when JavaScript error occurs
Variables
Variables are like placeholders for additional information that may require to fire a tag or trigger. These variables help define exactly what the tag or trigger is supposed to do.
Data Layer and Google Analytics Settings are most common variables. And some others are:
- Data Layer Variable
- Auto-Event Variable
- Constant Variable
- Google Analytics Settings Variable
- Refer URL Variable
- 1st Party Cookie Variable
- DOM Element Variable
- Regex Lookup Table Variable
- Lookup Table Variable
- Custom JavaScript Variable
- Click URL, ID and Class Variable
- Page URL Variable
- Form ID Variable
- Scroll depth threshold
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