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If you’re looking to gain insights into what actions users are taking on your website, Google Tag Manager is the tool for you. Working directly with Google Analytics, Tag Manager allows more granular tracking of goals and conversions without adding extra clutter to your site’s code.
Here’s a rundown of Google Tag Manager and how it can help your business make data-informed decisions to improve engagements, conversions and ROI.
Google Tag Manager is a tag management system that allows you to track website visitor behavior on your site.
Google Analytics provides a lot of data, but Google Tag Manager helps you better understand the data by tracking individual actions that impact your website goals.
With this tool, you will understand the effectiveness of your design and marketing objectives by seeing how users are interacting with your content, calls to action (CTAs), and form fills.
Using Google Tag Manager, brands are able to explore questions such as:
By creating tags to measure these unique actions or sets of actions, your business will have access to detailed user journeys, complementing the high-level overviews presented by Google Analytics.
To set up Google Tag Manager, you will first need to set up a Google Analytics account that tracks your website, along with a Google Tag Manager account.
In addition, you will also need access to your website’s code, or have a web developer on hand to add the snippet of code required for Google Tag Manager. Finally, you will want to brainstorm a list of actions or goals that you want to track, including specific page traffic and behaviors.
There are strategies you can use to identify the correct piece of the code on your site to track. If you’re stuck on what events to track for your website, consider your business’s goals, including marketing, operations and sales. Here are some examples of what you can track to help you get started:
While in Tag Manager, you can identify what web page events to track by using unique identifiers. Sometimes it may be necessary or helpful to add a new class or ID to the code to make isolating the event easier.
A tag is always paired with a trigger. This tag is named with the action the trigger is tracking. When you set up a goal in Google Analytics, the goal fields should match the tag fields in Google Tag Manager.
Once set up and working, use the preview screen to verify the tags are capturing user activity on your site and view the new events in Google Analytics under Real-Time and eventually under Events. Here is more detailed information on setting up Google Tag Manager.
You can view your newly tracked actions in Google Analytics, but tracking with Google Tag Manager provides additional opportunities to interpret website performance data.
Goals created in Google Analytics from tagged actions can also be synced with Google Data Studio to create reports. These reports provide a visual representation of your goals and other tracked actions with the data displayed in charts, tables and scorecards.
You can learn more about why your business needs a Data Studio dashboard in our recent blog post.
Once you’ve confirmed the tags are working properly, you can add your tags as Goals/Conversions in Google Analytics. This will allow you to incorporate the data into your collective site analytics and view trends and behaviors both for certain time periods and in real-time.
Client success is our mission at Integrity, and with Google Tag Manager, we’re able to highlight key metrics for our clients’ businesses. For example, we recently set up Tag Manager for a new marketing website that is seeking other businesses as partners for collaboration.
In setting up goals for Tag Manager, Integrity decided to track not only pageviews and clicks across the site to gauge activity, but we also set goals for the main call to action button across the entire site to track total clicks and individual page clicks.
With Tag Manager, we’re able to provide a view into specific user behaviors across our clients' websites so they have a deeper understanding of what their users are interacting with.
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At Integrity, we know that measurement is the key to management and Google Tag Manager makes detailed reporting possible even for small businesses.
Our digital marketing specialists can help your company successfully implement and maintain Google Tag Manager so that you have a real-time view of how your users are engaging with your website, allowing you to gain key insights and make informed decisions regarding your business operations. Contact our St. Louis marketing agency to get started.
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