An Introduction to Google Tag Manager
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool for measuring interactions with your website. It enables you to assess your marketing channels, analyse visitor journeys and capture what really matters to your organisation via goals.
The setup of Google Analytics is also pretty easy – you simply add a snippet of code that you obtain from your Google Analytics count to your site – ensuring that it appears on all pages.
Out of the box Google Analytics however has some limitations in terms of what you can capture on your site by default. For example if you want to capture visitors downloading files, clicking onto email links or outbound links or watching a video you need to add some additional code to your site to capture these via event tracking or virtual page views. Historically this has been achieved using Javascript added to your site – for example to onClick events (to capture when people click on a link or other web page element) or JQuery code – a Javascript library.
Google Tag Manager is a free tool from Google that makes setting up event tracking and adding tags to your site a lot easier. Rather than rely on your web development team to make complex changes to your site you can now use Google Tag Manager to add the Google Analytics tracking snippet, set up events (for example to track downloads or form completions) and even add other non-Google related tags to your site (e.g. Floodlight).
Google Tag Manager has been designed to be relatively easy to use and with a little learning you are free to take full control over tracking on your site. You start by creating a Google Tag Manager account at – www.google.com/tagmanager and create a “container” for your site. It’s then a matter of adding your Analytics account, configuring any advanced options you want to use and adding event tracking and other tags as required. Once complete you copy the tag manager code to your site so that it appears just after the opening <body> tag.
