Most website managers now know the importance of using Google Analytics to monitor traffic and user behavior. Many go beyond this and implement tracking and marketing tools like Hotjar and Hubspot. But what happens when these tools are not enough on their own? If you're ready to level-up your insights into what visitors are doing on your site, you need Google Tag Manager.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a service that sends detailed information about user behavior on your website to third parties. It allows you to manage scripts on your site (“tags” like Google Analytics tracking codes) more easily and with greater precision.
What can GTM do?
Let's say you want to add a Meta Pixel to your site, and also remove an old tracking code no longer in use. Instead of having to update the code of your website, GTM provides a web interface to easily make these changes.
In addition, GTM can monitor a ton of user behaviors, like clicks on certain buttons, how far users scroll, or when they abandon their shopping carts. After detecting these things, it can pass information to other tools you use. For example, you can send form submissions to Google Analytics to find out how many people are filling out forms on a month to month basis. You can even detect when they have started to fill out a form, but don't complete it. Then, you can pass this information to another third party (such as Meta) and serve these users an ad on Facebook that's tailored to them.
What are the benefits of using GTM?
As we mentioned above, Google Tag Manager allows you to send more information to third parties. Take Google Analytics as another example. It tracks many things on its own. But what if you want to see how many users are clicking on a particular button? You'll need Google Tag Manager for that.
Google Tag Manager also makes managing marketing tags much easier. Since website marketers and managers are not always coders, GTM empowers these people to change tags on their websites without having to call up a developer.
Thirdly, GTM can make your website load faster. Websites often have a large number of tags on their site, and these can slow things down for visitors. GTM tries to load tags asynchronously, which means that the content a user can see is generally loaded first. It can also combine multiple tags into one, resulting in fewer requests made to your web server. On top of this, you can (and should) configure GTM to load tags only when necessary. For example, you might only need Hotjar to run on your public-facing site, and not your members-only area. Rather than having it load everywhere, you can pinpoint where this code loads.
How do I set up Google Tag Manager?
To set up GTM, you paste a piece of code into your website, and configure tags, triggers, variables, and more within GTM. Unfortunately, there is a somewhat steep learning curve, though not one that's impossible to overcome with the help of online guides. Analytics Mania is one great resource, as are Google's own help docs.
Need someone to set up GTM for you? If you're ready to start getting even more valuable user data and need a helping hand, don't hesitate to reach out.