Do you need to install Google Analytics 4
or the Facebook Pixel or Google Ads conversion tracking on your website?
Well then you probably have come across a tool called Google Tag Manager.
It's a great tool to install tracking onto
your website and you can do it relatively easily and fast.
Hey there, my name is Julian,
and in the next few lessons, I want to introduce you to one
of my favorite tools for marketers, Google Tag Manager.
We'll discover how you can set it up,
deploy your tracking codes with GTM and I'll show you other cool functionality
inside of Google Tag Manager like event tracking and conversion tracking as well.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Let's take a quick look at what GTM is all about.
For that matter, I have already a demo here, a little website that looks familiar
to the other website here, but there is a subtle difference.
So on this page I have tracking already
installed and we can check up on this tracking with tools that you can install
for Google Chrome, like the Google Tag Assistant,
which shows us that we have a global site tag installed with Google Analytics 4
code installed here.
So that's sending data over to Google Analytics 4.
I also have the Facebook Pixel helper or the Meta Pixel
that you can install and it's sending over page view data.
Now, how did these codes get onto the page?
How were they installed?
Well, usually these tools ask you to install a little bit of code into your
code base and that is JavaScript that will then be executed by your browser.
Similar for Google Analytics 4 So here
we have the global site tag they want us to install.
So normally you would copy that, send it over to your developer to get it
implemented, and that's exactly what happened here as well.
You can look at the code by right clicking on our page and view page source
and looking where this code would be placed right here.
So here we have our Meta Pixel and then down here we have our Google
global site tag which is sending data over to our Google Analytics 4 ID.
All right, now let's take a look at this
website where we also have some tracking codes installed.
So the global site tag is installed here, remarketing for Google Ads.
And we have Google Tag Manager installed.
We also have here the Facebook Pixel exactly the same.
We have a Page view sending over.
Now how was this installed?
Let's check the view page source here again.
And if you scroll down, we don't find any of our classic codes
that we needed to install that the website asked us to install.
The only code that we can find here is Google Tag Manager.
And what Google Tag Manager is exactly,
is really just a snippet of code that you install on your website and henceforth all
of your tracking can be deployed through Google Tag Manager.
So you don't need to do any kind of code
changes once you have Google Tag Manager installed on your website.
With that comes an interface that you can access it's under tagmanager.google.com
and you can open up this interface and see what kind of tags are installed.
Also the edits that were made.
And when we go over to tags here, which are kind of like the snippets
of code that get deployed, you can see here we have Google Analytics 4
we have our Google Ads conversion linker remarketing and Facebook installed.
Now, the cool thing about
Google Tag Manager is it gives you loads of functionality to deploy this code,
but also some helpers that lets us do this all pretty easily.
So for instance, one cool functionality is that you have a preview mode so you can go
here on preview and that will put our browser into a special state.
We just need to enter the URL that we have our tracking codes installed on
and it will open up a new tab and then connect to our browser.
And you can see it's connected and we can
see all the tags that have been deployed on our website.
So we have our Facebook page view to tag
the Google Analytics 4 tag Google Ads and Google Ads conversion linker as well.
And some other tags haven't fired yet
because we have special kind of rules that govern these tags.
So let's actually go through a tag deployment.
So what if you wanted to create a new tag
that deploys a certain functionality on your website, a certain tracking code?
Let's actually get rid of our GA4 page view tag here.
I can delete this and let's do this from scratch.
So once you want to deploy a new tag,
you just go over here to new and then you give this whole thing a name.
I make it very descriptive so I later
know what this actually does and then I go to tag configuration.
And here we get all the different tools
that we can install via Google Tag Manager.
And there are actual tag templates.
These tag templates give us a way to configure our tracking code.
So instead of fiddling around in any kind
of the code that you would see right here, instead you get a little form to fill out.
So for example, here it asks us for the measurement ID so
we can find our measurement ID inside of the tracking code itself.
And we'll go through these steps a bit more in depth in the next lesson.
So here's also the measurement ID.
You can copy that and put this in here.
And we also want to send a page view event with this configuration.
And then we can choose our trigger.
So what our trigger?
Triggers are the rules that govern when a tag should be deployed.
We have different trigger available.
We can also create our own custom triggers but for now we'll just go
with the All Pages trigger because we want to deploy this tag on all the pages
to send a page view over every time the user changes the page.
So you click on Save and now the tag is not yet deployed on our website.
It's in a testing environment right now
and we can again utilize a preview mode to see if this gets deployed correctly.
So let's connect our domain again.
And here we see we have our
Google Ads Page view config tag now deployed fire at one time.
And this actually happens now on our page,
but only on our browser because we are in this preview mode.
So when you want to deploy this to all
your users, you could go ahead right here and then submit a version.
You can describe what you have changed in this version.
So we added GA4 and then we can publish this to all our users.
So now this is deployed and this is really
a version and control system within Google Tag Manager for your tracking deployment.
This is in many ways really cool because
if we make any kind of mistake later on, we can always roll back the version
and make sure that our tracking is working at any given time.
So this is now live on our website and we
can obviously control this again with our tag assistant.
We need to enable first reload this page.
And here we go.
We have Google Tag Manager installed
sometimes need to exit the cache, should also now see another tag here.
Here we go.
We have our global site tag installed as well.
So this seems to work and we have now done
our first tag deployment via Google Tag Manager.
And I hope you could see how easy it is
to do this really quickly in an interface that doesn't have to do too much
with code, as well as keeping it all under control because you have these controlled
structures of tags triggers and then later we'll talk about variables as well.
So just as a recap here we have deployed
now a tag through Google Tag Manager and this is done through one central
snippet that you need to install on your page.
It replaces all the other snippets because
henceforth you have this visual interface that you can deploy your tags through
Google Tag Manager onto your page, which consolidates all of the tracking
code into one and gives you all this awesome functionality from tags,
trigger and variables as well as a version control system and much more.
So I hope you can see that GTM can be
a really helpful tool for your tracking needs.
Now in order to really learn this tool, you need to practice a lot.
And in order to test your knowledge,
I have prepared actually a quiz for you that you can check out at measureschool.com/lesson1
test your knowledge there and we'll have some more resources as well.
If you enjoyed this lesson,
click the thumbs up button to recommend it to more people here on YouTube.
And click over here for the next lesson. See you there.