CXL Minidegree course review: Google Tag Manager Week 3

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I’m student at CXL Institute and for this Minidegree, I have to write and post a weekly review of what I learned. Today I will talk about GOOGLE TAG MANAGER.

INTRODUCTION

If we go back in time, adding tracking script to any website was a hard and risky task. In fact, you need to be a technical person or have someone to do it for you and you could break your website with the tracking code. GTM was create to help any person owning a website to add and manage tracking scripts with ease. GTM allows the marketing team to collect specific data on customer behavior, product performance and marketing campaigns independently.

If you use Google Analytics (GA) or another analytical tool, you are already tracking some data but it’s almost impossible to track specific and detailed users’ behavior or action on the website or campaigns as you will be able to do by using GTM.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GOOGLE TAG MANAGER AND GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Those are two different tools that can work separately. GTM is only dedicated to store and manage tracking scripts while GA is an analytical tool used to visualize data you opted to collect. The later can be used to generate reports and analysis by filtering collected data (conversion, segments, ecommerce, bound rate…). Tags you can add to GTM are third party scripts from GA, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hotjar…

HOW EASY IS IT TO INSTALL GTM?

To use GTM, follow the steps bellow:

Login to your google account, go to https://tagmanager.google.com and click create account.

Enter your company / website name in the account name, define your country and click continue.

You will then have to set up your container with the name of your site, choose the type of container (Web for a website) and validate the creation by clicking on Create.

Finally, accept the terms of use of GTM

ADVANTAGES AND LIMITS

Advantages

• Free
• You can add GTM without a developer
• Track change on tracking scripts
• Predefined tracking tags
• Easy sync with GA
• Security
• Preview / debug

Limits

• Can break website
• Can slow website

HOW TO TRACK EVENTS IN GTM

In order to get started with Google Tag Manager and properly configure your tags, you will first need to familiarize yourself with three basic concepts: container, trigger, variable.

• Container

A container holds all the tags of your site. When you create a container, you get the code you have to add to your website. Once this is done, you will be able to create, modify, deactivate or delete your tags independently via Google Tag Manager.

If you add a GA container, the data configured in Google Tag Manager is then displayed in Google Analytics reports. To access it, you will have to click on Behavior > Events > Top Events > Offsite Link

• Trigger

It tells GTM when, how and under what conditions a tag should be triggered so that data can be sent to your digital analytics tool. To be triggered, a tag must be associated with at least one trigger. On your site, your tags are used to measure a specific interaction (event), such as knowing when someone downloads a file or plays a video, when someone clicks on a CTA or when a form is submitted.

In Google Tag Manager, each of these interactions is called an “event”. When setting up a trigger, you can choose which event you want to track. Once you’ve chosen the trigger event to track, you’ll need to set up its trigger conditions.

• Variable, operator and value.

Tags depend on triggers, triggers depend on variables. Variables are additional information that GTM may need for your tag to be able to trigger the event. They contain the value that a trigger must evaluate to know if it should load or not.

Let’s talk about GTM events?

Event can be defined as the action that gives you the data you need to answer a tracking question you have.

Native events

Once you’ve installed your Tag Manager, you’ll need to understand different types of triggers that enable event tracking. Each of these has slightly different characteristics, here’s a little more context:

• Page view: those events tags trigger when the browser starts loading the web page, when the browser has finished loading the entire HTML or when all the resources on the page are fully loaded
• click those events tags trigger when users click on all clicks or some clicks, all links clicks or some links clicks
• user engagement
• other here you will find the form to create your custom events if all predefined tags don’t solve your question.

Custom events

There are many native events, but they do not always meet the needs that we may have. That’s why we have the possibility to create customized events in order to enlarge the field of possibilities.

Why use custom events?

Compensate native triggers limitations

You should know that some forms are not always as easy to track as you think (iFrame for example). There may also be a concern about the propagation of your JavaScript preventing GTM from capturing clicks.

Add context to an action on your site

The way you create a custom event allows you to add context to the event. This is the most used technique to send e-commerce information to Google Analytics. For example, it is necessary to create a custom variable if you want to report the cart value in a GTM tag, you can also report the ID of the ordered product this way. You will also need to create a custom variable if you want to differentiate B2C from B2B customers.

Make your tracking more reliable

In the context of contact forms, the reliability of some forms is sometimes problematic. For example, in many cases, if a user tries to submit a form, but does not fill it in completely or makes an error, the form.submit event will still be triggered. With custom events, we can counter this problem by using another trigger, such as the confirmation message visibility, to detect the submission of the form.

CONCLUSION

GTM is so useful when you have many tags to add to a single website without breaking it. All the code is store in GTM and only one script is added to the website. If you are serious about tracking data, you may use GTM.

In my next post, I will talk about data layer, another feature of GTM. You will learn what they are and how to use them.