Starting Out with Google Tag Manager #GoogleTagManagerGuide #s2ep04
Hello to all! How is it going? ????
In this episode, I will demonstrate how to utilize Google Tag Manager for efficient tag management. The tutorial will commence with an introduction to Google Tag Manager, followed by an explanation of the essential terminology such as tags, triggers, and variables. Finally, I will guide you through the process of adding Google Analytics to your website by using Google Tag Manager.
Why Use Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager enables you to manage all your marketing and analytics tags in a single location, acting as an intermediary layer between your website and various platforms. It provides you with the ability to simplify the management of diverse tags used in your marketing efforts.
For instance, if you wish to add a Google Analytics tag to every page of your website, and then you decide to add a Google Ads conversion tag and a Facebook event tag to a single thank-you page, you may manually embed the Google Analytics tag into your website's template, and then add the Google Ads and Facebook event tags to the specific page.
However, managing these tags would become difficult over time, and it would be easy to lose track of where the tags have been installed. With Google Tag Manager, we only need to add a single code snippet, known as the container, to all pages on our website. We then configure Google Tag Manager to trigger tags for specific pages or actions.
Indeed, that is the primary advantage of Google Tag Manager - it provides a centralized platform for managing all your tags.
What are Tags, Triggers, and Variables?
Now, let's go over some essential terminology. In most cases, a tag is a segment of JavaScript code that is responsible for collecting data and transmitting it to a particular platform, such as a Google Analytics tag that collects data about visitors to our website. Alternatively, we may use a tag to add extra features to our website.
For instance, we can utilize a tag to incorporate a social sharing widget into our blog or utilize the Google Optimize tag to personalize the content displayed to visitors on our website.
Triggers enable you to regulate when a tag should or should not trigger on your website. For example, we can utilize the built-in "All Pages" trigger to incorporate a tag into every page of our website, and we can also create our own custom triggers. Perhaps we want to monitor people clicking the announcement banner at the top of our website or fire a specific tag on a thank-you page. We can accomplish this by generating and applying triggers to our tags.
Variables act as placeholders for information that we can utilize in Google Tag Manager. For example, we may want to gather details about a link someone has clicked on our website, and then use this information in our tags, triggers, and even other variables. There is a wide range of built-in variables that allow us to access information automatically, and we can also create custom variables.
Lastly, we have our container, which stores all of the tags, triggers, and variables for our website.
Container Code
When we add Google Tag Manager to our website, we're essentially adding the Google Tag Manager container code. You can find your container code by clicking the unique ID at the top of the window, which will start with "GTM-".
There are two pieces of code that we're given: the first one is the JavaScript container code, which is the most important, and needs to be added to all of the pages of your website. This code should be placed inside the head tag on your website, ideally one of the first things in your head tag.
The second piece of code is the no-script version of the container. This code will load if someone has JavaScript disabled, but since almost all of the tags we use in Google Tag Manager are JavaScript-based, it won't improve the accuracy of the data we collect. If you can't add this extra no-script code to your website, it won't have a major impact.
Adding Container Code
There are various ways to add the container code to your website, depending on how it was created. For example, if you're using WordPress, you can use a plugin to add the plugin to all of your pages. Let's take a look at Site Kit by Google, a plugin for WordPress that can do this.
To add Google Tag Manager, you'll need to install and activate the plugin and then follow the steps to authorize access to your Google account. Once you've done that, you can connect Google Tag Manager to your website by selecting "Settings" and then "Connect More Services." From there, you can connect your Google Tag Manager account and container.
If you're using a different website platform, I recommend searching the support documentation from your platform provider. This should provide details on how to add the Google Tag Manager container code. If you need further assistance, please let me know in the comments below.
Now that we've added Google Tag Manager to our website, we can begin using it to track various metrics and improve our website's performance.
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Adding Google Analytics Tag
It's time to configure our first set of tags. Let's navigate to Google Tag Manager.
We'll begin by adding Google Analytics to our website, so let's create a new tag in Google Tag Manager. We'll name it "Google Analytics GA4" and select "Tag Configuration." For this tag, we'll choose GA4 Configuration, which is the latest version of Google Analytics.
In this episode, we'll focus on adding the tag, but if you'd like to learn more about GA4, check out my newsletter: learningSEOsocially. Now, we need to retrieve our measurement ID from Google Analytics.
In the admin area of our GA4 property, we'll select "Data Streams" and then choose the data stream for our website. From there, we can copy the measurement ID for our data stream in the top right corner.
Now, we'll head back to Google Tag Manager and paste our measurement ID.
Next, we need to select a trigger for our tag. We'll choose the "All Pages" trigger, which will fire our GA4 tag on all pages of our website. This will allow us to report on all pages that visitors see when they visit our website.
I'll cover best practices for previewing tags in another episode, so be sure to subscribe to be notified when I release more episodes on Google Tag Manager. Additionally, there's an option to publish the changes you've made to your live website. This is done through the "Submit" button.
Removing Existing Tags
If you already have the Google Analytics tag on your website, you'll want to remove it at the same time you publish your changes. Otherwise, you'll have both the tag from Google Tag Manager and your existing Google Analytics tag on your website, resulting in two identical tags which isn't ideal.
I'll be covering migration in more detail in another episode. For now, you've successfully added your first tags to Google Tag Manager, and you understand the difference between tags, triggers, and variables.
That's our introduction to Google Tag Manager. Are you ready to test your Google Tag Manager knowledge? You can visit my Google Tag Manager quiz at: https://forms.gle/B8e2TSRqqZscDZCRA
If you'd like to learn more about Google Tag Manager, then subscribe to my newsletter. Next episode, I'll show you how to add more tags to your website. We'll cover the Google Ads remarketing tag, and add the Facebook pixel.
To be continued...
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