So I'm willing to bet that you have at least one or two downloads on your site that you
hope people are downloading.
But, question: Are they actually downloading it?
I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, and today we are going to talk about how to set up a download
tracker in Google Tag Manager.
Okay, but first of all: What is Google Tag Manager?
So glad you asked.
Google Tag Manager allows you to get even more granular with the activities and behaviors
that you're tracking on your site through Google Analytics.
We can set up events in Google Tag Manager that carry over to Google Analytics that are
comprised of 3 sections.
We have the tags themselves, which are the events that we want to be tracking, there
are the triggers which is what Google Tag Manager looks for to fire off an event, and
then there are the variables, the pages that we want to be tracking this on, any number
of variables that you want to look at, Google Tag Manager has your back.
But also, why would we want to track downloads?
Why wouldn't we want to track downloads?
If you are putting content on your site, especially content to download, I'm willing to bet that
is taking up storage, page real estate, and mental real estate.
Are you actually getting the return on this investment?
This tag can help you with that.
It's also super useful if you are running active public relations or media relations
to see if people are downloading things like press kits, high resolution photos, any other
number of things.
So once we're signed into Google Tag Manager, you're going to want to go to "tags," hit
"new," then right off the bat just name the tag what the action is that you want people
to take, we will call this one "PDF Download."
And then choose "Universal Analytics" for your tag type and configuration, from there
we are going to track this as an "event," that's how we want to track it in Google Analytics.
In "category" we are going to type in "clicks," and in "action," "PDF download clicks."
Under "label" we are going to open brackets, hit it twice and start typing "Page Path,"
it will automatically open up and we can fill it in from there.
We're going to want to make sure our "non-interaction hit" is false, which means that this counts
as an interaction on our website that we want to track, which helps with lowering our bounce
rate and getting a better understanding of how people are interacting on the site.
We also want to make sure that our settings variable template is in place, and then we're
going to add a trigger.
We already have one set up for PDF downloads, but say we were doing this from scratch, we
would set this up as a new tag, focus on clicks being just links, activate "wait for tags,"
it will default to 2000 milliseconds, or 2 seconds, for all the tags that are using this
trigger to be ready.
And then we also want to check validation because isn't validation always nice?
We can set this up so the page URL matches RegEx ".*" and then keep your URL matches
a pdf so that we can really narrow it down to just the PDFs.
From there we can save both trigger and tag, and enter into preview mode.
I had already pulled up a page that I know has a PDF option on it, this is our guide
for applying for the Google Ad Grant, and we can see for here for instance we have PDF
download as a tag that is not currently firing on this page, I'm going to open this link
so it goes into a new tab, and lo and behold a tag that is now firing is "PDF Download."
I can even get a little granular with this and clicking on the tag itself I can make
sure it is tracking in the way that we specified from the configuration.
So we can see that's working there, with the action and label, and then from there we can
push this to go live.
So, are people actually downloading your stuff?
That is a great question!
And what can you do with the data once you start collecting it?
Well, if you are doing something right, do more of that thing.
And, if you're not seeing the activity and engagement that you hoped to be seeing, that
is a perfect opportunity to start A/B testing your site or A/B testing your download call
to action to see if you can get users that much further down your funnel of engagement.
I'm Olivia with Whole Whale, and if you want to know even more about how to use a funnel
of engagement, or drive deeper impact with your website, we have a course for that!
On "Impact Hacking."
You can access it at wholewhale.com/university and you can even get a discount with the code
WWVIDEO.
Thanks a lot and we'll see you soon.