In this lesson, I'm going to give you a quick overview on the core functionality
of Google Tag Manager. Why it's such an awesome tool for your tracking needs and
how you can use it to level up your digital marketing efforts.
All and more coming up. So let's dive in!
Hi there and welcome to another video of
measureschoo.com where we teach you the data-driven way of digital marketing.
In this first lesson of our Google Tag Manager for Beginners series, I'm going
to show you the core functionality of Google Tag Manager and why it's such an
awesome tool. Now before we get started, if you want to check your knowledge
after this video head over to measure school.com/lesson1 where we
have a little bit of a quiz prepared for you it you can go through and test your
knowledge and see if you have understood everything. But we still have lots to
cover so let's dive in.
So let's start out with the problem here, if you have a
website just like this online shop and you want to add tracking or marketing
functionality to the website, you will often be asked by outside third-party
tools to install a JavaScript tracking code. So for example here for Google
Analytics they ask you to install a JavaScript tracking code onto your
website, the same is the case for AdWords if you want to take advantage of the
remarketing feature and for example also this is the case for the Facebook pixel.
And really it's always the same they ask you to place one JavaScript onto the
HTML code of your page mostly in the head of the HTML code. But especially if
you have a bigger site, you might need to consult your developer to build that in
for you so you can use the marketing or tracking functionality of these
third-party vendors. The problem is you actually need to place it inside of the
HTML itself so you need to have access to your website. For example in this case
if I click on this website with the right-click, I can go in to view page
source.
And we can scroll down here we can see which tracking codes are installed so in
our case here we have the Facebook pixel code, we have also Google Analytics, and
down here we have the Google Remarketing code. This is also confirmed by our tools
here that we have installed the Tag Assistant by Google we can see Google
Analytics is installed and remarketing and also our Facebook pixel.
This is fine so far but you need to have access to actually deploy these codes. So
let's see how Google Tag Manager handles this. We go over to our demo shop here
which is another site where I have Google Tag Manager installed. And we can
see in the plug-ins that we have installed here the Google Tag Assistant
that we have the same tags installed Google Analytics, Google Remarketing, and
additionally Google Tag Manager plus the Facebook Pixel. Now the difference is
when we look into the page source, we can find really our codes except of the
Google Tag Manager code. And this is really what Google Tag Manager does. It
helps you to deploy other tracking codes through one central JavaScript code that
you need to install on your page. And through this script we'll be able to
deploy our marketing tags with ease. Once you have this Google Tag Manager code
installed on all your pages, you'll be able to manage your tracking and
marketing scripts also referred as marketing tags in a central management
console. And it looks a little bit like this. So here we are in our Google Tag
Manager account and from here we can manage all our marketing tags. So if you
click over to tags you can actually see which tags are currently deployed on our
website. To make this a little bit more visual Google Tag Manager has a great
feature called the Preview and Debug console which you can activate under
this publish button. And here under preview this will put your browser into
a special state which will allow you to test
and debug your implementation. So if you go back to your website where you have
Google Tag Manager installed, you can reload this website and you see it is a
little console that pops up at the bottom. And this really is only happening
for you and not for other users that visit your website at this time because
you have Google Tag Manager open on the other tab here. And what this console
allows us to do is see much more information about what tags have been
deployed on your website. So if you go to over to another site here, you can again
see which tags are fired. They're always the same because we configure them to
fire on any site of our website. But Google Tag Manager is actually
really good in handling exceptions. So if you only want to fire a tag on a certain
page, you can configure that within the management console. Now as the name
implies Google Tag Manager is really good at managing tags. So you have an
overview in this tool where you can see and configure new and existing tags. So
for example here with our Google Analytics tag we can click into it and
see all the configurations especially if we have done any kind of special
configurations to them. And so we can keep a record of the tag and the
configurations that are currently deployed. This is much more readable than
installing this JavaScript and looking up in the source code which
configurations have been deployed. As you can see, it gives us a great overview on
which tag has been deployed with which configurations and also what rule or
trigger is attached to deploy this marketing tab. In our case, we have a all
pages trigger deployed and triggers are really just rules to determine when a
tag should be deployed on the user's browser. The good thing triggers can be
reused. So for example this all pages trigger has been attached to
multiple of our text. Now let's go into a little bit of an example here to show
you the power of a tag deployment because Google Tag Manager makes it
really easy to deploy a tag and it actually takes you through the steps. So
for example, we can give our tag a name, we can choose the product, you can choose
the tag type here, and how our tracking ID, choose the configurations. Don't worry
if you don't understand what I'm doing right now, this is something we are going
to explore in later lessons in more detail. And then the last step we can
attach a trigger. Now as the name implies of my tag I don't want to fire this on
all the pages. I want to actually fire a Google Analytics event upon an Add to
Cart click. And here's another power of Google Tag Manager, it doesn't restrict
you in just deploying a tag based on the page that the user is on right now. But
you can actually build custom triggers that allow you to deploy a tag based on
an interaction. So let's do this here. You can create this trigger and attach it to
our tag, create this tag and we have a new tag in our queue here. What we can do
right now is test this tag before we actually deploy it to all our users so
you can make sure that it works correctly. All we need to do is go into
the preview and debug mode. And now we can go back to our page, reload our page. In
our case, we want to test an Add to Cart click so we need to go to a product page.
And I'll click on this Add to Cart button it opens up a new tab and we can
see that our Google Analytics event has fired when we clicked the Add to Cart
button. So now the information should have been sent over to Google Analytics.
You can also look into our tool here and see that we have an event call that
happened with our filled out information here. That would also be possible to see
in our real-time reporting under events, we see that a event just happened.
So this is a really easy way to deploy a tag and configure it and test it out. But
we have actually not yet deployed this tag to all our users. This is only
functioning on our browser which is very handy if we have more complicated tag
deployments and need to test our implementation before we go into
production with it or live onto the website. So the last step is actually
publishing this as a version to all our users. How do we do this? By simply
pressing this publish button here once we have tested everything and publish
this now. So now it will be available to track the interactions of all our users.
And Google Tag Manager does it this way because they are actually a built in
version control into the system as well. So up here under the version menu,
you'll be able to see which versions have been published in your account and
you'll be able to reverse or go back to an older version if something broke
in your last deployment.
So there you have it a quick overview on Google Tag
Manager. Now did you understand everything? Well test your knowledge by
heading over to measure school.com/lesson1 where we have a quiz prepared
for you that you can go through and see if you understood everything that we
taught in this video. And afterwards we'll send you some more resources to
deepen your knowledge. Now if you enjoyed this lesson then join me at the lesson
number 2 where we're going to discover on how to install Google Tag Manager
correctly on your website. My name is Julian. Til next time!