What is Google Tag Manager in Digital Marketing?

Monitoring and tracking your digital marketing strategy is crucial to the success of your business. But how do you keep track of your marketing data? Most companies use tools like Google Analytics. However, many businesses are implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM) for easier tracking administration.

But what makes Google Tag Manager the tag management tool of choice for organizations of all sizes? This article explains what GTM is, how it works, and how it benefits your business.

What is Google Tag Manager (GTM)?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free digital marketing tool for tag management that allows you to track and deploy data by inserting code snippets into your website or app.

Tag Manager allows you to create and manage your HTML or JavaScript tags for conversion tracking, website analytics, remarketing, and other purposes. It enables customers to implement GTM tags without changing the code while increasing the volume and type of data collected.

How to Set Up Google Tag Manager

If your business already utilizes Google Analytics, then setting up Google Tag Manager will be easy. To get started, you have to create your GTM account. This should be as simple as filling out your company’s name, country, website domain, and platform type.

After creating your account, the next step is to get your Google Tag Manager code and add the container code to all pages on your website. Then, it will be time to create your first tag, which is usually the Google Analytics code snippet.

Subsequently, you should enable preview mode to ensure the tag is firing and get a real-time report from Google Analytics to make sure the visits are being recorded. Finally, you then publish the container.

What are the Benefits of Google Tag Manager?

Besides being completely free, Google Tag Manager offers multiple benefits to its users. Here are a few advantages of implementing GTM into your digital marketing strategy:

Does Not Require Any Coding Knowledge

Without Google Tag Manager, a web developer must hardcode the page whenever a tag needs to be added, modified, or removed. Because GTM does not require any coding knowledge, it eliminates the struggle of hardcoding tags.

Google Tag Manager allows digital marketing professionals to add tracking codes and implement, edit, and remove tags without needing a web developer. This is exceptionally beneficial for small businesses because it allows them to maximize online tracking with limited technical support.

Streamline Collaboration Across Your Business

Google Tag Manager makes it easy to collaborate with your team. Workspaces and granular access controls enable your team to collaborate more effectively, while multi-environment testing allows you to publish to multiple environments to verify everything is operating as expected.

Additionally, you may assign user-specific permission to ensure everyone has their defined level of access.

Third-Party Tags

Your business may only utilize Google tags such as Google Analytics and Google Ads to access data from your website or app. However, as your business grows, you may discover the need for a third-party platform.

Tag Manager supports all tags and provides simple preconfigured templates for various Google and third-party tags for web and mobile applications.

Boost Your Page Speeds

Tags in Google Tag Manager are deployed asynchronously; this means that if there is a slow-loading tag, it will not prevent other tags from firing. This avoids the risk of a slow-loading tag hindering the rest from deploying.

How is Google Tag Manager Different From Google Analytics?

Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics (GA) are both free digital marketing tools offered by Google. However, GTM and GA serve different purposes.

Google Analytics is a tool designed to analyze your business website or app data. GA provides its user with a comprehensive platform that provides a detailed measurement of their digital marketing campaigns.

GTM is a platform for deploying and storing tags, but it cannot examine analyzed data reports, so the data is sent to Google Analytics. In other words, Tag Manager controls what information is sent to Google Analytics for analysis.

Tag manager is not meant to replace Google Analytics. Instead, both tools should be used simultaneously to create an easy-to-use system to track data analytics.

Both tools are similar; however, Google Analytics is used for analyzing web data, while Google Tag Manager is used for transmitting data points. Together, they help you keep track of essential analytics to improve your business website.

Conclusion: Should you Use GTM?

The answer is: yes! Every business, regardless of size, should learn how to use GTM. Google Tag Manager is a powerful tool; it provides marketers with an easy-to-use centralized platform to stay ahead of all the digital marketing trends while keeping your website speedy.

By now, you should know GTM offers excellent opportunities for improving your business website. The platform allows users to measure, analyze, and create actionable steps to optimize marketing and website performance!

There is no need to wait for a web developer; feel free to test out this free tool by Google today! It allows you to quickly experiment and improve strategies that align with new digital marketing trends without relying on outside help.