In this video, I'm gonna show you how you can track interactions with the help of Google
Tag Manager, transfer them to Google Analytics as events, and make them useful to improve
your website.
All that and more coming up right after this.
Hi there and welcome to another video of Measureschool.com, where we teach you the data-driven way of
digital marketing.
Now, in the last lesson of our Google Tag Manager for Beginners series, we installed
our first tag, and showed you how you can migrate tags over to Google Tag Manager safely
and securely.
In this lesson, we're gonna talk about my favorite feature of Google Tag Manager, and,
frankly, what Google Tag Manager is best known for, and this is the interaction tracking
via Auto-Event triggers.
Before we get started, as always, we have a little bit of a challenge for you prepared
at measureschool.com/lesson5, where you can test your knowledge and see whether you understood
everything we taught you in this video.
But now, we've got lots to cover.
Let's get started.
Back at our demo shop, before we start talking about how we can pick up interactions with
the help of Google Tag Manager, we actually need to talk about triggers.
What are triggers?
Well, if you go over to Google Tag Manager, we have already our first tag deployed, with
the All Pages trigger attached.
What are triggers exactly?
Well, really they are just rules that determine when our tag should be deployed.
So in the case of the All Pages trigger, it will deploy our tag on all the pages that
Google Tag Manager is installed on.
Now, what if you only wanted to deploy our tag on one page?
Then we would need to configure a new trigger.
Let's go into a little example here.
Let's go into our Google Analytics tag, and actually edit our triggers.
We'll get rid of our All Pages trigger and add a new trigger to the tag.
We can do this by going into our trigger menu, which will show us all our triggers.
Right now, we only have our All Pages trigger, which is built in.
You can click on this plus button to create a new trigger.
And let's say we wanted to deploy this tag only on the contact page.
Now we need to configure this tag by clicking in this menu again.
And we have different options here.
We already see some of these interactions that we will get to in a minute.
But really, what the All Pages trigger did is fire our tag upon page use, or when we
enter the site.
And there's an event for this, called the Page View event, so we can click on this.
And now we can filter down, and instead of choosing All Page Views, we can go with Some
Page Views here.
And this filter menu opens, and you have different options here.
Right now we could choose, for example, the page URL, and it should contain our contact
address.
Let's save this.
Save our tag, and enter the Preview and Debug mode.
Let's go back to our demo shop, reload our demo shop.
We see our Preview and Debug mode, and let's go to the contact page.
And we get a little bit of an error, which is a little bit misleading.
A small bug here, because actually, if you go to Page View, we see that our Google Analytics
Page View tag was deployed correctly.
And if you go to any other page, for example, this landing page, we see that the Page View
was not loaded.
Let's go back to our contact page and see how we can actually inspect triggers within
the Preview and Debug mode.
We simply need to find the tag that was deployed here under our Page View event.
And we can click on it and scroll down, and we see our firing triggers.
We see that it fired upon our contact trigger turning true, which means that the event equaled
gtm.js, something that you don't have to understand for right now, but our page URL contained
contact, which is true because we see the contact up right here.
So that is how you can use triggers to fire tags on only specific pages.
I will go back here and change this around, because we want to actually fire our Page
View tag on all pages within our site, otherwise our general page view tracking would not work
anymore.
But as you could see, we have now a additional contact trigger configured that we could also
reuse in other tags.
But now, let's take a step back and look at a little bit of theory about triggers and
how they actually function, so we can utilize our knowledge for configuring an interaction-based
trigger afterwards.
Once you deploy a trigger through Google Tag Manager, it will be the instance that decides
whether a tag should be deployed and be able to transfer data over to the marketing vendor,
in our case, Google Analytics.
In the case of these special Auto-Event triggers, like click trails or from trails, there are
two more functionalities that these triggers carry.
One is the listener, and the second one is the filter that decides whether a tag should
fire or not.
How does that look like?
Another example.
Well, let's say you have Google Tag Manager installed on a website, and an Auto-Event
trigger installed.
This trigger will listen for every interaction on that page based on the event that you chose,
and send the data over to Google Tag Manager, and then, depending on your filter settings
within your trigger, this will lead to a tag deployment or a prevention of that tag deployment
when an interaction is registered.
Now, let's take a look at how this would play out in practice.
All right, back at our demo shop.
We now want to get into interaction tracking.
And I've chosen this product page here of our demo shop, where we want to track the
Add to Cart click.
Now, the first step is a little bit of a configuration that you have to do one time.
You need to go over to Google Tag Manager and make sure in your variables menu that
you have your click variables activated.
If that is not the case, you can go to the Configure button here and scroll down to your
click variables.
Make sure that they are all enabled.
Once you have done that, you don't have to do it again, and we can proceed with the setup
of our interaction tracking, the first step being building a generic click trigger.
Now, the purpose of this generic click trigger is actually the listener part.
You want to know if the listener part works correctly.
So we go on a new trigger here, and title this trigger.
And go into the configurations, and we'll choose All Elements, 'cause our button is
not a link, so we'll go with All Elements here.
And for now, we'll keep the All Clicks fire on option ticked in order to pick up all the
clicks that are happening on the website.
Let's save this and go into our Preview and Debug mode.
Let's go back to our demo shop, reload our demo shop.
And we can see whether our listener works.
If we click anywhere on the website, we see that down here, a new gtm.click event was
initiated.
Now what we want to do is actually click on different elements here, and I will do this
with the command key pressed, so if, for example, we're gonna click on this home button, it
opens up a new tab.
This will prevent my browser from reloading, and we will be able to inspect these events
a little bit closer.
And, of course, I will also click on our Add to Cart click here, which was our click number
seven.
And what we can do now is actually look a little bit closer into this and inspect these
events.
So if I click on this sixth click here and look into the variables, we'll be able to
see our click variables that we have just enabled.
Now, these click variables will be automatically filled by Google Tag Manager depending on
what you're clicking on.
So what we want to find out is, which of these variables can we use for our filter in order
to only fire when somebody clicks on this Add to Cart click.
Now, we clicked here on the home menu, so our click text actually got filled with home.
If you go to the next event here, we see we clicked on the Add to Cart button, and the
click text was filled with Add to Cart.
So we can use the click text to filter down and only make our trigger turn true when somebody
clicks on the Add to Cart button.
How would we do that in Google Tag Manager?
Well, we would turn our generic click trigger into a specific one.
So let's go back into the click trigger and rename our trigger.
My naming convention is usually the trigger type, and then a little bit of a description.
That should do it.
And now we can configure our trigger again.
We'll leave the trigger type as is.
We'll just change the fire on option here, go to Some Clicks, and choose our variable
that we want to filter down on, which is a click text, which should contain Add to Cart.
That should do it.
Let's save this.
Now, unfortunately we won't be able to see anything in the Preview and Debug mode if
you test that out right now, because we need to test triggers in conjunction with tags.
So let's attach our trigger to a new tag.
Let's go over to our tags here and build a new tag.
And what I wanna build is actually a Google Analytics event tag which fires on an Add
to Cart click.
Now we can configure our tag.
Click here again on Universal Analytics and enter our Tracking ID.
And instead of the track type being Page View, it makes sense to send interaction data to
Google Analytics via the event type.
So we go with event tracking here.
And there are a few more things to fill out.
The category, and the action.
This is specific to Google Analytics.
If you would use a different web analytics tool, then there might be other configurations
that you would need to take care of.
This should do it.
Now all we need to do is attach a trigger.
And we can choose our click, the Add to Cart click trigger.
Let's save this, and refresh our Preview and Debug mode.
Go back to our product page here in our demo shop.
Let's reload that.
And let's first do the negative test.
I'm gonna click on this home button.
Let's see if anything fires.
Nothing fired on this event.
And now let's click on the Add to Cart button.
Let's see if anything fired.
Yes, as expected, our Google Analytics event tag fired.
Now we will be able to see that also in our extension of the Google Tag Assistant.
In Google Analytics, we see here, one event fired.
So that should work.
If you go back to Google Analytics directly, into our reporting, and go into the real-time
reporting, we should also be able to see that.
And here's our event that was just sent over.
So this works as expected, and we have successfully built in our first interaction tracking event
with the help of Google Tag Manager.
In the end, we'll be able to publish this as a version to all our users.
So now you know how to track events with the help of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics.
Now, there are many other interactions that you might want to track with the help of Google
Tag Manager, and we have some other videos on that which I will link up below.
But after this video, if you wanna take action on the knowledge that you have actually acquired
here, then head over to measureschool.com/lesson5, where we have a little bit of a challenge
for you prepared that you can go through in order to solidify your learning.
So check that out at measureschool.com/lesson5.
And if you liked this video, then join me at the next lesson, where we're really gonna
talk about the most important interaction that you should be tracking, which are your
conversions.
I'm Julian.
Till next time.