In this lesson, I'm gonna teach you how to install your first tag with Google Tag Manager,
and we're actually gonna talk a little bit about migration of existing tags on your website
to Google Tag Manager.
All and more coming up right after this.
Hi there, and welcome to another video of measureschool.com where teach you the data-driven
way of digital marketing.
My name is Julian.
And in the last lesson, we discovered how Google Tag Manager fits into our organization.
Now, in this lesson, we're gonna get into the little bit more nitty-gritty stuff of
actually installing our first tags, and taking advantage of the migration from the hard coded
tags that you might have on your site to Google Tag Manager.
But before we get started, as always, if you wanna test your knowledge after this video,
head over to measureschool.com/lesson4 where you'll find a little bit of a quiz that you
can go through.
And upon submission, we'll send you more resources.
We got a lot to cover, so let's dive in.
All right, this time we start out by talking about processes.
It's very important that you integrate a tag deployment into the processes that you have
within the company.
We talked about this already in the last lesson.
Now, on this lesson, we're gonna take a look at such a process that is advisable to follow
when doing a tag deployment.
And the tag deployment process really consists of four steps, the first step being planning
and preparing your implementation.
And this is particularly true if you are planning on deploying many different tags, or migrating
any kind of tags over to Google Tag Manager.
This step will help you to think through your implementation, give you a little bit of a
documentation outside of what Google Tag Manager provides, and also prepare you for step number
three, when we're actually gonna QA our implementation.
Now once you have a solid plan established, you would start implementing this into Google
Tag manager, and this really goes into the nitty-gritty of deploying a tag within the
interface of Google Manager.
Once you're done with this, it's important to test and debug your implementation to get
rid of any mistakes, see if the marketing vendor actually gets the right data, and compare
the tag implementation with your previously prepared plan, in order to prepare your implementation
for the last step, which is then deploying your tags to the website or publishing them,
so they actually record real data from real users visiting your website.
So let's get into our first real tag deployment, going through these steps.
Then go to our demo shop.
We want to go through the first tag deployment in this course, and we're gonna follow the
steps that we have outlined.
So first of all would be drafting a solid plan and preparing our implementation.
So what do we actually wanna do in this example?
Well, we want to migrate our Google Analytics tag over to Google Tag Manager.
Now, we have already Google Tag Manager installed as we can see here in our Tag Assistant by
Google.
That's an extension that you can download to your Chrome browser, and we have here the
green light that Google Tag Manger has installed correctly.
And we also see a Google Analytics tag that is installed.
And once we click on that, we can actually look into the code snippet.
And we also have a option here to view the source, so we can actually see how Google
Analytics is installed on this page.
And wee see that there is a Google Analytics code right here, which means that Google Analytics,
at the moment, is not yet deployed through Google Tag Manager but has its own code snippet
on the actual HTML of our website.
So this is one of these things that you might want to record and take notice of, especially
if you want to do a bigger tag migration.
You need to go through all the tags that are installed on your website, and figure out
how to migrate them over to Google Tag Manager.
Now that we have a pretty good overview on what tags are currently installed on our website,
we would need to prepare a plan where we think things through in order to start our tag migration,
and we have a little bit of a template prepared for you that you can check out at measureschool.com/tagplan,
which will give you a little bit of a structure with examples here to plan out your integration.
So you would have here a tag name, description, where it should be deployed, and the configurations.
Once you have this all prepared, you're ready to go into Google Tag Manager and input that
as the configurations, but this makes a lot of sense, especially if you have multiple
tags that you want to install.
So we have templates here for Google Analytics, Google Analytics event tracking, conversion
tracking, so you could expand that to fit your tag implementation, and will give you
a great overview later on to see which tags are installed, and where they are installed.
So on our case here, let's get rid of this, these examples here.
We would say we want to deploy a Google Analytics tag, and this will be a general page view
tracking tag that's gonna be deployed on all pages.
This is the name that I will also use for our Google Tag Manager later on, and you see
it's in a certain format that let's me recognize the tag very fast, especially when I have
multiple tags in Google Tag Manager.
Description of this would be a general page view tag that should be deployed on all the
sites of demoshop.com.
And the configurations are nothing special here.
We just need to make sure that we are sending this data to the right account.
So I'm gonna go over to my Google Analytics, look in to the admin section, and find out
what is our Google Analytics ID.
Go to the tracking information here.
Here we have the tracking ID.
That's something I'm gonna copy, and paste into my sheet as well.
So we have the general information available before we even go into Google Tag Manager,
and we can do our tag deployment faster and more efficient.
And I would recommend to do this for every tag that you deploy.
All right.
Let's go to the next step, the implementation step.
We would actually go over to Google Tag Manager, search for our account, and start deploying
our first tag.
We can go ahead and go into the tag menu here, and create a new tag.
Now again, we will enter a name here.
I would suggest that you have a naming convention that you follow in order to find your tags
faster in the account later.
So now in our case, we have the product name, we have the general purpose or the description,
and the trigger that is attached to it.
There could be extra information attached, especially if you have multiple general page
view tags.
In the next step, you're gonna chose the product.
In our case, it's Google Analytics.
And we are using the universal analytics version of Google Analytics.
I'll click on continue, and then we need to configure the tag.
There are multiple configurations, but the important thing that we need to fill out is
the tracking ID that we as well have prepared another sheet here, so we can copy paste that
in.
Now, there are a lot of different other configurations that you could choose.
In our case, we just want to have the normal tracking capabilities of Google Analytics.
So every time somebody visits a page, a page view gets generated in Google Analytics and
sent to this tracking ID.
So that does it for now.
And in next step, we need to configure the fire on option.
This is really the rule that governs whether our tag should be deployed or not.
In our case, we want to deploy it on all the pages of our website, so we can go with the
all pages trigger.
We get into more triggers in a later lesson.
Now, what I need to do is create this tag.
So now we have implemented the tag.
But before we simply publish this to all our users, we want to make sure it actually works.
So how do we do this?
We can go into the special preview and debug mode, which is available on the publish menu
here.
I'm clicking on preview.
This will put our browser into a special mode that let's us see debug information on the
actual website.
Once we are in this debug mode, we can go back to our demo shop, reload our demo shop,
and we see our debug console open.
Now on this debug console, we can automatically see which tags have fired on this page.
In our case, it's the Google Analytics general page view tag.
So this tag was deployed and data was sent to the marketing vendor.
How can we make sure if it's actually true?
But in some cases there are special extensions like the Tag Assistant for the Google products,
and we can see that a Google Analytics tag was deployed, but we get a warning because
we are actually tracking twice.
As you might know, we still have the hard coded version of Google Analytics in our HTML
code, and now we are deploying it a second time through Google Tag Manager.
And this is expected, because right now we have it two times installed.
We can click on this to page view here and see whether there's any actual difference
between these two page views, but really there isn't.
And this shows us that our page view tag actually works the same as the hard coded version.
Now this is just an extension that have some data here.
What we really ought to check is whether our data is received by the actual marketing vendor,
so in our case, Google Analytics.
Let's go over to Google Analytics, and actually go into the reporting menu here, and go onto
the real-time reporting.
Once we reload this page here, we see that there's a new page view generated, actually
two page views generated because we still have the hard coded version on our page.
So this lets me see that our page view tag is working correctly, and we are ready for
the actual tag deployment.
Now, in our case, we are doing something special here, because we are doing actual tag migration,
and we don't want our page view tag fire twice.
So, once we deploy this tag, we actually need to make sure our hard coded version is removed
from the website, so the page view tag doesn't fire twice.
So let's go ahead and remove our hard coded Google Analytics Scripts.
This might differ from your implementation.
I have built it right into our theme, so I just need to delete it from our theme file.
And we have the Google Analytics script right here.
Now I'm gonna delete this section.
And before I update the file, I'm actually gonna deploy our Google Analytics tag through
Google Tag Manger.
So we're gonna go on this publish button.
Publish this as a version to all our users, and at the same time, remove our Google Analytics
code snippet.
So now Google Analytics should be deployed solely through Google Tag Manger.
We can of course look into our preview and debug console again, on our actual page.
It will tell us that Google Analytics is deployed, and when we look into our Tag Assistant, you
see that this time, there's only one Google Analytics page view generated.
And this version is now live to all our users so we are actually collecting real data with
Google Tag Manger and Google Analytics.
In the end, you can of course leave the preview mode on your browser, and check the whole
thing again.
And in our Tag Assistant, we still see that we have a page view request generated.
So we have successfully moved our Google Analytics script over into Tag Manager, and deployed
it through our new tag management implementation.
And this is how you go through the four steps of tag deployment.
Plan and prepare your implementation, implement your tag with Google Tag Manager, preview
and debug it, and then deploy and publish it, so it's live to all your users.
So there you have it.
Congratulations.
You have gone through your first tag deployment, and discover the process on how to migrate
your tags over from your website to Google Tag Manager.
Now I hope you like this lesson.
Now before you move on, check out our course at measureschool.com/lesson4 where we have
a little bit of a quiz for you to test your knowledge.
And once you submit, we'll send you some more resources.
In the next lesson, we're gonna discover a really cool feature of Google Tag Manager
which makes it really unique, which is the auto event triggers.
And this is really all about interaction tracker.
So don't miss out on the next level.
Go over to the next video, and I'll see you there hopefully.
My name is Julian, until next time.