In this video, I'm going to give you a quick overview on the core functionalities of Google
Tag Manager, why it's such an awesome tool to use for your tracking deployment, and how
you can utilize it to level up your analytics.
All and more, coming up.
Hey there and
welcome back to another video of measureschool.com teaching you the data-driven way of digital
marketing.
My name is
Julian.
On this channel, we do marketing tech reviews, tutorials and tips and tricks videos around
analytics and tracking.
So if you haven't yet, consider subscribing down below.
Now it's 2019.
And I wanted to redo our very popular Google Tag Manager for beginners series.
In this first lesson, we're going to talk about the core functionalities.
And I give you a quick overview of what Google Tag Manager is all about.
If you want to test your knowledge at the end of this video, then I have a quiz prepared
for you.
You can head over to measureschool.com/lesson1 and fill out this quiz.
And I'm going to give you results later on in some more resources.
But for now, we got lots to cover.
So let's dive in.
Welcome to Google Tag Manager.
Now, before we dive into the interface and what you can do here, let's first define the
problem that Google Tag Manager helps us to solve.
So let's say you have a website where you want to extend the functionality via third-party
tools, such as tracking tools like Google Analytics, or to advertising like on Facebook
ads.
Oftentimes, these tools ask you to install tracking code onto your page.
And these tracking codes look a little bit like this.
These are JavaScript code, and also oftentimes referred to in marketing terms as marketing
tags.
And you see them quite often with third-party tools.
So for example here, Google Analytics has its tag.
Facebook has it's tagged with the Facebook pixel.
Or Google Ads also ask you to install its tag to you your page.
To install them
most of the times, they asked you to place the codes in the head section of the HTML
of your page.
What does that mean?
Well, I have a little example here where we have our tags already installed.
And we can view the HTML code by right-clicking and viewing page source.
So here's the HTML document.
And if we scroll down, we can see that we already have our tags installed here.
Right here we have our Google tags and then we have our facebook pixel.
And this is where you would normally place your tags.
Now, we can see that these tags are currently installed with the help of the extensions
the Google Tag assistant.
So here we see we have our Google Ads remarketing and our Google Analytics.
And we also have our facebook pixel help extension, which shows us that the Facebook pixel is
deployed correctly.
Now, how does Google Tag Manager fit into all of these?
Well, let's take a look at an example where I have Google Tag Manager deployed.
As we can in the tag assistant, we still have Google Analytics deployed and the remarketing.
Additionally, Google Tag Manager and the Facebook pixel helper tells us that the Facebook pixel
has been deployed correctly.
The difference is when we look into the view page source here that we can find our tracking
codes nowhere except the Google Tag Manager code.
And this is a tag in itself, this is the Google Tag Manager container snippet, which is placed
on this website.
And this is what Google Tag Manager at its core really does.
You get one central Google Tag Manager snippet that you installed onto your page.
And henceforth, you can control and deploy tags through a central Management Console.
And this is this interface.
So when we go over to tags here, we can see the different codes that we have installed.
And if you use a tag template, we don't actually have to mess with any kind of these codes
here.
But it gives you a graphical user interface where you can configure everything and see
how everything is configured.
Now, as the name implies from this central tool, we can manage all our different codes,
implement them, but also see what is installed under which circumstances.
And Google tag manager comes with a heap of useful tools.
For example, the preview mode.
If I click this button here, it will put my browser and only my browser into a special
state which allows me on my website, where I have Google Tag Manager installed to see
a preview window down here, which gives me more information of which tags have been deployed
on this particular page view.
So I go over to the next page, I see again, which tags have been deployed.
Now, this seems to be always the same.
And that's because I attached a trigger, which is like a rule to these tags to tell them
when they should be deployed.
And in our case, that would be the all pages trigger.
So I want to fire these tags on all the pages that the users visit on our website.
But Google Tag Manager is actually very well equipped to fire tags under specific circumstances
that you define.
So as an example here, let's fire tag when the user clicks on this Add to Cart button.
And that's really the power of Google Tag Manager.
Because we can define triggers to fire on interactions, such as a button click or a
scroll on our website.
So let's define here a new tag.
This will be a Google Analytics event tag for our Add to Cart clock.
As a tag configuration, we'll just choose our tool here.
I would choose the track type event.
Don't worry if you don't understand what I'm doing right here.
We will explain this in later lessons.
And now I can define my firing trigger.
For that, I will go on to the triggers that I have available.
And I'm going to define a new trigger, this will be a
click trigger for our Add to Cart button.
And I have a host of different interactions that I can choose.
You see, we have element visibility, form submission, scroll depth, and so on.
But we want to go with a click trigger where we can choose
under which conditions this should fire.
In our case, that would be the click text.
And I wanted to contain Add to Cart.
Let's save this.
And now it's attached to our tag and see if this works.
Let's save this.
And this again, when the power of the preview mode comes in, we can refresh this.
And now we're going to try it out by clicking on our Add to Cart button.
And we see that our Google Analytics event tag has fired.
And when we go over to Google Analytics, let's go into the real-time reporting and see under
our events it was received right here by Google Analytics as well.
So really easily, you can set up interaction based tracking with the help of Google Tag
Manager without actually going through the exercise of coding anything up just through
this central management console.
Now, this tracking itself is not yet live on the website.
It happens only on my browser because what Google Tag Manager has built in is a preview
system, which we have used with our preview console down here.
And then a version control system.
So in order to deploy the striking to all our users who visit the website, we need to
submit this as a version.
So click the on the submit button, you can name your versions
and then publish them to all your users.
And at that moment, it will become live on your website.
And this is a best practice system because Google Tag Manager actually keeps track of
the versions that have been deployed.
So at any time, if you find that your tracking is not working anymore or a mistake has been
made, you can easily roll back to a prior version where you're tracking was working
correctly.
In that regard, Google Tag Manager is really an awesome tool for handling your marketing
tags efficiently through this central management console and simply deploying your tags faster
because you just have one central snippet that all your tags go through.
All right, so there you have it a quick overview of the core functionalities of Google Tag
Manager.
Did you understand everything?
Well, if you want to test your knowledge, head over to measureschool.com/lesson1 where
I have a little bit of a quiz prepared for you that you can go through and then you'll
get your results and see where you can improve.
And if you want to learn more about Google Tag Manager, stick around and subscribe to
our channel right over there.
Because we bring you new videos just like this one.
And our next lesson just next week.
And if it's already there, you can click right over there as well.
As always, my name is Julian til next time.