CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review | Week 10| Google Tag Managers for Beginners.

What is a Google Tag Manager? Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website (or mobile app) without having to modify the code. We know that Google Tag Manager is sort of watching what is going on as the users taking different behaviors, whether it is moving from page to page or a video or a button click or whatever else, and the promise was that tag manager is actually sending all these data back to the different storage devices, right? It is telling Facebook, certain things are happening or analytics or whatever else and that is a very, very helpful way to think about it. But how does it actually do that, right? How does it do that?

Google Tag Manager has these things called tags, now, the most helpful way and the most useful way to think about this is really, this is what you want Google Tag Manager to do. I want you to go tell this platform or that platform or the other platform, what is going on, that is it. That is all it really comes down to, it is basically the script. It is the code that instead of copying and pasting, for example, Google Analytics code that you would get from Google Analytics in your back end when you set up Google Analytics. Instead of just copying and pasting that script, you would let tag manager essentially do that for you.

Instead of copying and pasting the Hotjar script that you get when you would go to set up Hotjar on your own on to individual pages, you would give that to tag manager to do the copying and pasting of the script on the different pages. So, that's kind of how it is actually getting in there, in these different platforms. Just tag manager is quite literally putting the scripts on the pages at the appropriate times and firing the different things that it needs to fire so that the platforms know what is going on.

What are "Triggers"? How do you think about triggers? The most useful way that I have found to think about triggers is when do you want Google Tag Manager to take an action. So, we have set up Tag Manager to sort of oversee what is going on, and it sees all the different user behaviors that are happening on the page.

What is a "Variable"? How do we think about variables in Google Tag Manager? Well really, a variable is just information that Google Tag Manager needs in order to do its job. So, if you think about a tag, and a tag is what Tag Manager needs to do, and then you think about the trigger and the trigger is when should Google Tag Manager do the thing that it needs to do, a variable is just here's information you are going to needing order to do the thing that you need to do when you need to do it, That's really it.

A Tag Manager variable is just information in the hands of Google Tag Manager. So, we have got our little Tag Manager here and it is overseeing the journey that is happening, all the different behaviors on our little journey, and as we talked about before we have the tags where we just had what platforms were being told information then we brought in triggers and we said okay, here are the platforms that are being told at a Pageview event or the platforms that are being told at a Play Video event or the platforms that are being told at a Conversion event. The conversion that Play Video and Pageview in this case being our triggers. Then we bring in variables, so variables again are just information. So, we have got in this case a Pageview and it is telling the different platforms somebody is on the page. But how does it know which page to tell them? Well, that is actually what a variable does. So, the variable in this case would be the page path of /welcome would be information. So now we can tell them not that they are on a page, but that they are on this specific page.

The way that Tag Manager's organized, you have the account, and you have the container under the account. Kind of similar, if you are familiar with analytics, you have an account in analytics and you have got a property. The difference in analytics, you have another level down, which is the view. You do not have that here in Tag Manager. So, you have got the account, and you have got the container. The way to think about the structure starts at user levels with the accounts. Now figuratively is we will come in, and we will check out their users, and instead of seeing a nice list of just a few admins and everybody being a user, and then only having access to certain containers, we see that everybody is an admin. Now, the reason that that happens is because people will come in here, and they will click on "new, “they’ll add a new user, you know, they'll add [email protected], and then, they immediately flip them to admin, maybe it's a vendor or something like that, they give them full ability to publish the container -or containers, if you have different containers they'll all be listed here - and they're off to the races and then, what happens is you will see lots of admins and everybody's got power. Well, the challenge here is "admin" is a super user, consider them kind of like the super user. There is only two levels: there is a user, and then there is the admin, so the admin is the super user. The admin can kick other people out, including you. The admin can delete the account, right? We actually had a client whose Tag Manager account was deleted by a vendor that they gave admin access to, and that vendor had no reason to have admin access to It. So, the vendor should have been a user, and that way, they could not have deleted their account. So, admin, you only give to people who need to add and remove other users, up to and including yourself, that they can do that. So, there is no way, there is no just one sort of primary user: there is either everybody is an admin, or they are a user, right?

When we come into Tag Manager, you have an option, this is something called a workspace, you are in this workspace, and you are, by default, in the, guess what, default workspace. You can click on this, and when you do that you have the default workspace along with two other workspaces that are available to you. Now, why would you use a workspace? Here’s why, if there are multiple people back in your Tag Manager container and two people can be in the container at the same time, it is highly likely that somebody's going to overwrite somebody else's changes, workspaces helps to keep those separate and siloed so that changes are not overwritten, and if somebody does change something that would affect somebody else's container, Tag Manager will alert you to that and allow you to update everything so you're always working off of the most recent version. So, it really just helps keep things organized for sure back there, but really from overwriting each other's changes. Now, if you are just the only one back here, you probably won't need to use workspaces an awful lot.