Digital Analytics
Google Tag Manager for Beginners | CXL Course Review
Increase power and control over data measurement
Chris Mercer (Measure Marketing) is the instructor in several courses that are part of the CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree Program. This article will briefly cover Google Tag Manager for Beginners.
The title may be “for beginners”, but this is not a course you should skim through. It consists of 21 lessons, each covering both theory and practical explanations, with a cumulative duration of seven hours.
The goal of this training program is to give you:
Knowledge of how to use Google Tag Manager to deploy third-party tracking scripts.
The power to set up tracking without having to rely on a developer.
A system you can immediately use to make sure all of your tags (HotJar, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc.) stay organized.
Table of content:
- What is Tag Manager?
- What is Google Tag Manager?
- Tags, Triggers, Variables
- Data Layer
- Getting started with Google Tag Manager
- Organization
- Preview Mode
- Workspaces
- Should you use a built-in option or a custom-made HTML tag?
- Tracking Engagement: Clicks, Time, Scroll
- Tracking e-commerce
- Setting up a cross-domain tracking
- Closing
What is Tag Manager?
Tag Manager gives you the ability to add and update your tags for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and more. As explained on Wikipedia, tag managers were developed as powerful tools to create rich data in the space between the user, their browser, and the property. This data can be fed to marketing tools or even used to make dynamic changes to the website or application itself.
What is Google Tag Manager?
Google Tag Manager helps you to manage and deploy marketing snippets of code or tracking pixels on your website or mobile app without having to know any programming language.
Google Tag Manager is free (you need a Google account to use it) and unchallenging to learn.
Chris Mercer had a great speech at CXL’s Elite Camp 2016 about using Google Tag Manager to improve sales and leads. It’s just 20 minutes long but it will help you save much more time:
Tags, Triggers, Variables
Tags are segments of code provided by analytics, marketing, and support vendors to help you integrate their products into your websites or mobile apps.
The trigger tells the tag to fire when the specified event is detected. Every tag must have at least one trigger to fire.
The variable is a symbol in code that can be used to represent a value that will change.
Tags are “what” you want GTM to do. Triggers are “when” you want GTM to do the thing you want it to do. Variables provide “information” that may be needed by either the tag or the trigger.
Tags need triggers to fire, although you can use “tag sequencing” to fire another tag, even if that tag does not have an existing trigger associated with it.
Data Layer
Google Tag Manager works best when installed alongside a data layer.
A data layer is a JavaScript object that is used to pass information from your website to your Tag Manager container. You can then use that information to populate variables and activate triggers in your tag configurations.
When setting up your website or mobile app to work with Google Tag Manager and a data layer, think about what categories of information the data layer should handle:
- Product data: Product name, price, category
- Marketing campaign data: Traffic source, medium
- Transaction data: Cart value, checkout date
- Customer data: New or returning customer
Getting started with Google Tag Manager
Google made several short videos explaining the basics of Google Tag Manager, collected in YouTube playlist:
Organization
A most common practice is to set up a single Tag Manager account for all containers. Within that account, the most common practice is to use a unique container for each website or mobile app.
Use Folders to organize a container’s tags, triggers, and variables into logical groups that will help make your Tag Manager configurations easier to manage. Folders can be used to organize your content by project, by a team, or by type.
Preview Mode
The Preview Mode allows you to browse a site on which your container code is implemented to test a container configuration before it is published.
Clicking the “Preview” button tells GTM to move into “Preview” mode. You’ll know you’re previewing when you see the orange “Now Previewing” message at the top of your GTM container.
Workspaces
Workspaces help avoid user “collisions” that might occur when multiple users are in the same GTM container at the same time. They are temporary spaces and automatically go away once they are published.
Should you use a built-in option or a custom-made HTML tag?
Always check to see if there is a built-in option provided by the ad platform itself. If so, it’s generally advisable to use that tag. If there isn’t an option provided by the platform, then you can (in most cases) look toward the custom HTML tag as an alternative.
Additional resources about using built-in and-or custom HTML tags:
- Google’s Guide to Deploying Google Ads Tags
- Google’s Guide to the Conversion Linker
- Facebook’s Guide to Installing Pixels Using GTM
- Facebook’s Pixel Helper Chrome Extension
Tracking Engagement: Clicks, Time, Scroll
To fire tags based on click events, use Google Tag Manager’s click trigger. When an element is clicked on a page that matches the trigger conditions, GTM will automatically populate values for any active click-based built-in variables.
The timer trigger allows you to send events to Google Tag Manager at timed intervals. Use this trigger to measure the amount of time a user spends on a page to complete a task.
The scroll depth trigger is used to fire tags based on how far a user has scrolled down a web page.
- Vertical Scroll Depths — how far down a user has scrolled the page.
- Horizontal Scroll Depths — how far to the right a user has scrolled the page.
Tracking e-commerce
Google Tag Manager can send both standard and enhanced e-commerce transactions to Google Analytics.
To learn more about tracking e-commerce, visit:
Setting up a cross-domain tracking
Google Tag Manager makes cross-domain setup easy, but it’s not automatic. Be sure to customize your Google Analytics Settings variable so the “allowLinker” is set to “true” and fill the “Auto Link Domains” field with the list of domains you want to link together.
Google Tag Manager can send both standard e-commerce transactions and enhanced e-commerce transactions to Google Analytics.
Closing
Google Tag Manager is an essential skill of any technical digital marketer or analyst. Learning how to apply basic Google Tag Manager knowledge will bring you increased power and control over data measurement.
If you liked this article, you might want to read about another Mercer’s courses on CXL:
